Today the sea is dead calm. It seems as though the ship is not moving, that we are standing still while an indolent current swirls around the vessel. While we sip our morning lattes on the deck, there is not a breath of air, no birds, no insects and no people to disturb the silence. It reminds me of the “Ancient Mariner” floating around on the Sargasso sea.
This peace gives one space to contemplate some of the oddities of living on a ship that is almost 1000 ft long. For example yesterday we crossed the International Dateline. When the dateline was in the middle of the ship,that meant that the front half of the ship was tomorrow (eg.Monday) and the back half of the ship was yesterday (eg. Tuesday). What happened to to-day ? Was it somewhere, unaccounted for, in the middle of the ship? To make matters worse, the International Dateline at this point in the Pacific Ocean is not a straight line…..it turns corners and goes back and forth. Don’t ask me why, it is a mystery of life…..perhaps there is some tiny island that wants to be in the same time zone as its neighbour.
Just think what it would be like to live on an island with the dateline running through lt. One half of the island would be tomorrow and one half would be yesterday. Consider the ramifications: If your day was going badly, you could cross the line into tomorrow and eliminate yesterday. Or vice versa, you could return to yesterday and re-do it, hopefully with a better outcome. Or maybe you could live on the dateline and always live in the moment.
Are you still with me?
In any case we crossed from today into tomorrow with a plan to return tomorrow night to yesterday. Our ship’s captain gave us specific instructions on how to deal with the time change. Here is how it will happen.
“Today is Nov.21. Tonight we will move our clocks forward 48 hours to Nov.23. So tomorrow night we will turn our clocks back 24 hours and it will be Wed, Nov 23 once again.”
Has anyone tried to change the time on a digital watch?
Have I confused you yet?
I want to know where Nov.22 went. Does every day not have value? Can we just arbitrarily decide to obliterate a day? What if that day is someone’s birthday? Or an anniversary or a funeral? And what gives us the power to live one day over again? What if it is a day we would rather forget? Do we really have to relive it?
OOPS! My pen just flew apart! Maybe I have said enough on this subject….and .maybe I should cut back on the margaritas!
Another Time Related Conundrum
A few days after leaving Los Angeles, Hal and I kept showing up one hour early for our daily dinner reservation. After this happened a few times I decided to find out what were were doing wrong. So I approached our dining room Hostess to see if she had an explanation. Her answered with a broad smile on her face :
” If you look over at that wall, you will see the “ship’s time” which is what we follow onboard ” as she scurried away with a group of diners.
Sure enough, the tiny digital clock was an hour earlier than the time our watches’ GPS indicated. Oh well, I thought I could live with that. The mental math wouldn’t be difficult.
A little while later the Captain asked us turn our clocks back one hour which then meant the discrepancy in time would be 2 hours. What? How does that work? It kinda made me feel like we were slowly cruising into the ” Twilight Zone”. After all we hadn’t seen any other boats of any size or shape for days.
That’s not the end of the story.
One night on our way to dinner we encountered one of the ship’s officers in the elevator. I figured he would be the one to help me understand “ship’s time”. I am like a dog with a bone, I don’t give up easily.
I approached him with high expectations.
” Excuse me , sir. May I ask you a question.”
He replied with a smile ” Sure, I am happy to help.”
” I am very curious about ‘ship time’ ” Can you explain to me what it is and why it differs from GPS time.” I noticed that he was surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder at the elevator’s control panel, probably trying to figure out how quickly he would be able to escape. Because I could see what he had on his mind, I carefully moved into position in front of the door. No escape now!
“Ship time is what we use onboard this vessel. However I cannot explain why that is, (pause) or how it works. ” Hmmmm, that’s interesting.
With another smile on his face he added, ” I find the solution is to wear two watches, one on each wrist,” pointing them out to me.
There you have it. Mystery solved!
Or so I thought. The Captain just announced at lunch that our clocks will need to be turned back one hour tonight so our time will coincide with the time in Tahiti when we land tomorrow.
Can you tell me what to do with this mess tonight?
Current times:
Ship’s clock: 2:05 pm
Computer : 5:05 pm
Watch : 8:05 pm
Phone : 2:05 pm/Nov.25 (tomorrow)
Clearly I have too many time pieces so I am just going to chuck them all and just follow the sun. Is that not what holidays are all about?
Lynda
The Swan Nebula
24″ x “36 $1200 Cdn. includes shipping + taxes
theartoftravelchronicles@gmail.com
Cruise Ship Chronicles 
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