Forum Discussion

cosninocanines's avatar
May 14, 2013

Sleeping in Daylight

We will be traveling from AZ to AK in June and July and I need some advise. My wife can sleep anytime anywhere but I'm proned to waking up as soon as the sky lightens up. What can I do to help me get to sleep and stay asleep when there's no true darkness. I tried a sleep mask (getting ready) and that didn't really work, how can I do the best job of blacking out (darkening) the sleep quarters in our fifth wheel.

19 Replies

  • Joe....darn if you didn't nail it exactly. Did something similar some years back when I left Los Anchorage in the dark at 1:30 and was just passing over Gulkana when the sun rose over the Wrangells a couple hours later. Spectacular and, with due apologies, can't be duplicated, no-how, no-way, in Ewe-stun Texas.

    To the OP, I'd offer the same advice as joe b......stay up until you're tired enough that the light doesn't bother you. Make the odd hours part of the adventure. Pick some evening (i.e. midnight or later in the summer) when you're not tired and wander away from the RV...just enjoy the stillness and the quiet, watch the pale pinks and oranges of sunrise and sunset, both between 2 - 4 a.m. and so forth.

    Granted, it's not RV'ng, but one of the real joys I find in the summer (even in the southern banana belt of Los Anchorage area) is to fiddle around at the cabin all night long, then hit the sack about 5 a.m.....some of the best sleep of my life follows.
  • My new computer must be too full of pixels to stop spewing them out. LOL.

    Sleep patterns tend to be a cultural matter, IMHO. My wife doesn't buy my advice about just closing her eyes, either, but she was raised as a city girl. Her parents worked the 8 to 5 routine, as did everyone she knew. Whereas, I grew up on a ranch in southern Oklahoma, the cultural center of the universe, so to speak, and I saw people working from "can see to can't see" for a schedule. Care of livestock, doesn't go by a clock or a watch. You work when you need to, and sleep when you can. So depending on how a person is raised, will have a good deal of how that person deals with the 24 hours of daylight in the north.

    In Alaska, as Bill mentioned, most locals switch over to what is called "Indian time" in the summers. The original residents of Interior Alaska, that consider themselves to be by heritage, Athabascan Indians, tend to work with nature, not create ways to fight it. When your next winter's food supply is primarily based on hunting, gathering and fishing, you fish when the salmon run, in the summer time. You don't look at your watch and "ah", the weekend is here and I don't have to fish or hunt. If you hope to eat next winter and feed your family, you go at it every hour of the day and night you can do so.

    Several summers I worked as a commercial drift net fisherman on the Yukon River. You fished however long the Dept of Fish and Feathers would allow. If the opening was for 72 hours, that is what you spent in your boat. The first 24 hours weren't too bad for staying awake but after that it was tough. I usually would hire one of the teenage boys from a close by fish camp, to fish with me and his only job, was to stay awake and to wake me up as needed as we drifted.

    Drift fishing the Yukon is interesting to me. In places the middle and lower river, are between a half mile and a mile wide, slow moving current, much like the lower Mississippi River. (about the same color too) So a fisherman in a river boat will lay out about 300 feet of net, with a lead line on the bottom and a cork line on the top, across the current. Then the outboard engine is used to keep the boat drifting downstream at the same speed as the net. At the end of the drift, after anywhere from one to three hours, you pull in the net, take out the king salmon caught and run back upstream to where you started, and do it all over again. So I would get the net set, the engine set to hold the boat even with the net, and try to go to sleep for the time it took to do the drift. My young employees job was to wake me at the end of the drift or if we snagged the net, or a drift log was going to hit the net. After 2 or 3 drifts, I would catch enough sleep to be able to run the youngster back to where his family was fishing and he could catch some sleep, while I picked up his brother or went back to fish alone for awhile.

    Not sure the human body ever gets completely used to sleeping in segments or not. But much of my life, I have done this due to the job I had at the time. So, enjoy the north country as much as you can, while there, as you can sleep when you get back home.

    My last job, before retirement, was as a deputy coroner in western Colorado. I don't remember ever signing a death certificate listing "lack of sleep" as the cause of death. :D
    A few from guys that told their wives, "you won't pull that trigger" or "hey, everybody, watch this".
  • I find that just closing my eyes makes it dark inside, try it. One of the few advantages of getting older, that I have found is no one minds me taking a nap after lunch, in my recliner. It is bright daylight in the living room but that sure doesn't stop me from sleeping nor anyone else I know.

    Trackrig is so correct in that Alaska and northern Canada operate on a 24 hour system in the summer time, so much to get done before the next winter arrives. To me, even though I worked most of the years I lived in rural Alaska, the time of day often had little effect on activities. I still remember, being out on Tangle Lakes in my kayak, by myself, fly rod in hand trying to fool a grayling into grabbing my fishing fly at 3AM. So still, very few bugs out and about on the water, few other people out, wildlife doing their thing and not paying much attention to a guy on the lake. Then when I would get tired, I would go back to the RV and sleep for a few hours, then get up and go do something else.

    Once time when I was living in Galena, 300 miles west of Fairbanks, I had planned to fly into Fairbanks the next day, it was in the summer time. About 10PM it hit me, "why am I waiting till tommorrow to go into see the bright lights?" So I grabbed my travel bag and headed over to the airport to fire up my airplane. Just a beautiful flight into town, for the 3 hour flight. Wasn't a bump in the air to be found, just calm. Arrived in Fairbanks about 3AM and called the airport control tower for landing clearance, from out aways from the airport. The tower operator asked me if I would mind helping them tune their radio system by giving them several long counts, over my aircraft radio, which I did. They recognized my aircraft call sign, as a semi local, as I was into there often. Then they asked if I was in any hurry, which of course I wasn't. So they asked me to do seveal low fly bys down the main runway, without landing, we tested out the VASI (visual approach slope indicator) system at the end of the runway and a few other things. So by this time it was getting close to 4AM, the sun was getting brighter, etc. Landed, grabbed the car, I often kept at the airport in the summer and went into town for breakfast, then saw the people I went into town to see. Rented a room at the old Nordale Hotel downtown (it has since burned) caught a few hours sleep and back out to the airport. It was probably close to 9PM when I lifted off the runway and started making a climbing right turn to head west. Soon, off the left wing tip was the panaramic view of Mount McKinley and the surrounding mountains, ahead of me, the Tanana River flowing to meet up with the mighty Yukon River, just above Tanana. So about midnight I contacted the Galena tower and landed, got the plane parked and tied down and headed to the house. Was in bed by 2AM, give or take, for a few hours sleep before starting another day.

    Remember, this is the trip of a lifetime, break out, do somethings differently to create some memories. So that later in life, you can look at your spouse and comment, "remember that hike we took in Alaska in the middle of the night?" These are the things you tell your friends when you get home, not "we put covers over our windows and went to bed every night at 10PM, just like we do here in Badwater, Texas." LOL :)
  • Don't forget to plug up the fan/vent in bedroom.

    You can get a soft vent cover that just sticks in OR use some Reflectix to cover opening
  • We have the limo grade film on our bedroom windows and I set the blinds up instead of down to also help keep the sun out. Works great for us.
  • It's really not a problem since you're not working and don't have to keep any specific hours. Go all day and into what you're used to calling night. With all of the sunlight there's no reason to stop doing whatever you were doing. When you get tired, then go to sleep. Don't try and force youre self to sleep at any particular time. If the light really bothers you in the bedroom, a cheap temporary fix is to cover the inside of the window with some tinfoil, it's cheap, quick and easy to remove. Scotch tape will hold it in place for the trip. It won't let the light through. If you see tinfoil in a window up here, 99% of the time it's a new person.

    Bill
  • An easy solution is to buy some of that Reflectix insulation (looks like a cross between aluminum foil and bubble wrap). You should be able to get it at a local hardware. You cut it to fit between the window and the existing blinds, and it does a good job darkening things up. In the morning you can remove it, and then either store it flat somewhere, or roll the pieces up.
  • My wife has the same problem. I solved that by covering the two bedroom windows with black opague window film. It was a bit of chore putting it on, but it left the bedroom dark even in broad daylight.
  • We got some thick black material and made covers for all the insides of the windows. This made it real dark.