Day 84. The First April 12th, 2009.

I gotta say, there is a lot of advantages to traveling around the world on a ship. Even though, technically, I have been on the move for 90 days now, we are all completely at home while we’re at sea. Life is so normal here, we’re so accustomed to it, that we hardly even notice it anymore.

Sea conditions have strengthened a bit, as we get further away from land in the mighty Pacific Ocean, we tend to rumble and tumble a bit… but nothing too horrible. Like I said, it takes a lot to get our attention these days.


Anyway… today’s hype was all about the INTERNATIONAL DATELINE. Tonight at Midnight, in order to compensate for the crossing of the 180th Latitute, the Int’l Dateline, our ship will retard its clock 24 hours at once, effectively jumping backwards 1 calendar day. Today was Sunday the 12th… tomorrow will also be Sunday the 12th. Since I effectively get to re-live the day, I have taken advantage of my freedom. Since midnight last night, I have invested in the stock market, bought a house, killed a hobo, and donated $4,000 to the Saffy Lessans Fund for Injured Antelope (SLaFIA). I figure at midnight tonight it’ll all get wiped away and I’ll be free from those decisions- it’s a flawless plan.

To commemorate the crossing, the ship played Groundhog day on the TV loop, the story about a man who lives the same day again and again and again.

The Dateline is pretty interesting, and the story of how it was developed is too. Here’s some info on it given to us in the Dean’s Memo this afternoon:

“The Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan is credited with the first circumnavigation of the Earth.  He sailed westward from Seville with 5 ships in 1519, and was killed by a local chief named Lapu-Lapu on Mactan Island near Cebu in the Philippines on April 27, 1521.  However, members of his crew successfully made their way west back to Spain on his sole remaining ship, arriving in early fall, 1522.   Comparisons of their shipboard calendars with the date of their arrival in Spain revealed that their diary was a day ahead (e.g., a Thursday rather than a Wednesday) of the actual date, even though they had accurately kept count of the days along the voyage.  This discrepancy was of great interest at the time and was understood to be a consequence of gaining a day by traveling west to east around the world.  Emissaries were even sent to the Pope to explain this geographical novelty.  Over the ensuing years, the need to determine longitudinal position with precision was solved by the invention of accurate clocks that would keep track of time at a fixed location.  That location was established in 1675 to be the Greenwich Royal Observatory near London, England, and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became the international standard.  One hour is 1/24th of a day, so one hour corresponds to 15º of longitude (360º/24 hours = 15º).  Local time is determined from GMT by adding an hour (going east) or subtracting an hour (west) for each 15º of longitude.  In actuality, there are 25 time zones, ranging from -12 to 0 to +12, with GMT being the 0 time zone.  These time zones are sometimes indicated by the letters A through Z (with the peculiar exception that J is not used).  Letters A through M are used counting eastward from Greenwich, with M abutting the International Date Line; letters N through Y are used counting westward from Greenwich, with Y abutting the International Date Line on the west
side.  GMT is assigned the letter Z, which in military jargon is called ‘Zulu”, so sometimes you will see GMT time given as Zulu time.  The acronym, UTC, is a more recent replacement for GMT; it stands for Universal Coordinated Time.  The International Date Line is a nautical date line that wasn’t set by international agreement until 1917.   Except where it deviates to place various land masses on one side or the other, the International Date Line follows the 180º meridian of longitude, an excellent choice because it is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where few people would be inconvenienced by confusion about which day it is.”





Alright. Right now I am 15 HOURS ahead of the East Coast of the United States. At Midnight tonight, I will be 7 HOURS BEHIND the same place, 20 some hours behind Japan, China and all that I left behind.

Yes, time is a human invention, but it’s an important one, and ours changes significantly tonight.



Catch you on the flip side,

Greg