What she did not have — could not have had — was the experience of being alone on a disabled vessel in the ocean for 41 days. No amount of offshore sailing experience provides that specific preparation. The 41 days she spent alone on the Hazana were experience she was acquiring as she went, drawing on everything she had learned before but finding that some of what she needed she had to invent.
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## What It Means to Sleep at Sea Alone
One dimension of the 41 days that is easy to underestimate from land-based perspective is the problem of sleep.
A vessel underway at sea does not stop when its skipper needs to sleep. It continues moving in whatever direction the wind and current are taking it, until it hits something or until someone steers it. On a crewed vessel, the sleep problem is managed by watches: crew members take turns being awake and responsible for the vessel, while others sleep. On a single-handed vessel, the skipper must manage the sleep problem alone.
The standard approaches for single-handed offshore sailing in Ashcraft’s era included heaving-to (a technique for reducing the vessel’s forward progress and stabilizing its motion while the sails are backed and the helm is lashed), setting a course and lashing the helm to maintain it while the vessel self-steers, and simply sleeping in short intervals of 20 to 30 minutes at a time, returning to the deck to scan for traffic.
Ashcraft’s vessel was not a modern singlehanded racing yacht with autopilot, radar, and AIS systems that would warn of approaching traffic. It was a damaged 44-foot sloop with a jury rig, in the open Pacific well away from major shipping lanes. The traffic risk — the probability that another vessel would appear in her small circle of visibility and intersect her path before she could take avoiding action — was present but relatively low at the latitudes and longitudes she was crossing.