The twelve-to-four is the watch nobody volunteers for and every Second Officer ends up with. Midnight to four in the morning, then again from noon. You get used to it, in the sense that you stop expecting to feel rested.
Handover
You arrive on the bridge about ten minutes early, because arriving on time means the officer you are relieving has to wait, and nobody does that twice. The first thing you do is stand still and let your eyes adjust. The bridge is dark on purpose — instruments dimmed to the point of barely glowing, no white light anywhere.
Then the handover. Position, course, speed, what is on the radar, what the weather is doing, anything the Master has left standing orders about. The Third Officer points out two targets, tells me the starboard radar has been dropping out intermittently, and goes to bed.
What the watch actually is
People imagine steering. There is no steering. The autopilot holds the course and has done since we left the pilot station four days ago. What you are doing is watching — and the watching is the job.
Every fifteen or twenty minutes you take a round of the instruments: radar on both ranges, a look at the ECDIS, a glance at the engine parameters repeated on the bridge, a scan out of the windows with your own eyes. Every hour you write the log. Once a watch you check the gyro against the magnetic compass and record the error, because if the gyro drifts and nobody notices, the ship quietly turns.
The lookout
At night there is a rating on the bridge with you as lookout, and this matters more than the regulations make it sound. Two people see things one person misses. He spots a fishing boat off the port bow twenty minutes before it shows properly on radar, because small wooden boats in a swell are a poor radar target and a human eye is not.
The conversation on a night watch is its own thing. Long silences, then twenty minutes about his daughter starting school, then silence again. You learn more about the crew on the twelve-to-four than anywhere else on the ship.
FROM THE LOGBOOKNothing happens for three hours and fifty minutes. Then something happens, and the entire point of the previous three hours and fifty minutes is that you are awake for it.
The one thing that happens
At around 0230 a target appears on the radar at twelve miles, crossing. I plot it, get a closest point of approach of six-tenths of a mile, and that is too close for open ocean at night.
So: a call on VHF that goes unanswered, then a ten-degree alteration to starboard, early and obvious, so the other ship can see what I am doing on his own radar. He alters too, a few minutes later. We pass two miles apart and neither of us ever speaks. That is a normal, well-handled encounter, and it takes about twenty-five minutes from first sighting to being clear.
Four o’clock
The Chief Officer comes up at ten to four, and the same ritual runs in reverse. In summer in the North Atlantic there is already light in the sky by then, which somehow makes it worse — you go to bed as the world starts up.
You sleep until about seven-thirty. Breakfast, a couple of hours of paperwork or chart corrections, lunch, then back on the bridge at noon for the second half of the same watch. Repeat for four months.