I don’t feel a sensation of motion or hear waves crash against a hull. It’s a hard feeling to place. Maybe it’s the feeling of waking up somewhere new as daylight hits my face — a new day rather than a new land.
I’m a deep sleeper so I leave the curtains slightly open as a secondary alarm clock. Last year I spent a few weeks in Paris and slept in a room which could be hermetically sealed from daylight by closing the shutters: I slept all the way through to the afternoon several times.
But what makes this feeling so peculiar is that I’ve only been on boats a handful of times. The large majority of that small number has been spent crossing the English Channel — little voyages across that tiny stretch of sea. There was just one time that I slept in a cabin.