03 May 2009, Crossing the North Atlantic.

This is the 3rd day of our crossing and the weather is holding fine. The sun is shining and with the temperatures in the low seventies it is very pleasant on deck but not too warm. The waves have changed direction again today thus the ship is riding very steady. Tomorrow there is another wave field coming from the north and then the ship will move again a little bit. This is relative as we only talk about waves varying between 2 and 3 feet instead of 4 or 5 feet. It is expected that the weather will remain nice for the foreseeable future. I promised yesterday to tell you something about the time changes onboard the ship and why we are doing it onboard the Prinsendam during the day time. There are options galore for when to give a time change and there can be heated discussions about which option is the best. Most of the time it all depends on what issue onboard is affected the most by the moment of the time change.

Due to the fact that the earth is round and circles around the sun; we have to deal with the phenomena of day and night. And it is day or night at different times in different places, all depending on when the earth turns a part of its globe in the direction of the sun. If the world was flat and did not move than we would have either sun all day or night all day (unless we made the sun move of course) As a result of it all we have different times at different locations in the world. The standard measurement for the world time, at least for us sea farers, is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is English time without the adjustment for winter time. Greenwich has been chosen to be the zero point. From there we count time differences in minus when going west from Greenwich and in plus when going East of Greenwich.

When we left Fort Lauderdale we were on GMT – 4 hours and the Azores with Punta Delgada are on GMT +/- 0 hours. So they are sitting on the Greenwich zero meridian or at least close to it; in the same time zone. Thus to get from -4 to 0 we have put the clocks forward by 4 hours. We could do that in one go. Say at 8 am, we put all the clocks forward by 4 hours, which makes it noon time. Apart from losing a whole morning (no lectures, no bingo, no coffee time and breakfast and lunch would be combined in a brunch) it would play havoc with the sunrise and sunset, because the ships time would jump four hours towards the sun but the sun would still be rising at its own time. Thus it would be dark until quite late in the (ships) morning.

Therefore the routine is to do it in steps. If you would be on a slow ship, taking 8 days for a crossing, you could do 30 minutes each day. On a faster ship you have to do one hour each day to make it a gradual happening. It also makes it easier for your body to accept it. (Airplane flights have a large time change in just a few hours and those result in jet lag)

Hours forward take time away. If we have to do it between ports, then it is done early in the morning, when everybody is asleep, but you will loose an hour of night rest. With an ocean crossing, people come for rest and relaxation and then loosing an hour’s sleep nearly every night is not pleasant. If you do it in the middle of the day, you hardly miss that hour. It is around lunch time anyway. So you still go to lunch around noon time, you finish lunch instead of 12.45 at 13.45 but you still have the whole afternoon ahead of you. Also you are less inclined to go to bed early than otherwise would be the case when it feels like 10 pm. new time already at 9 pm. in the evening.

My experience is that lunch time clock changes have less of an impact on shipboard life than multiple night time changes during a crossing. Thus I do my Voice from the Bridge each day starting at 12.00 hrs and ending it at 13.05 hrs.

Tomorrow is another sea day and then I will explain something about weather monitoring that we do onboard. In the meantime our medivac crew member is still in Hamilton hospital. He is doing better but still needs to undergo a plethora of tests as it is still not certain what his medical problem is.