20 April 2012; Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala.

It’s early, not only for me, but also for the poor people that were going on the flight tour. But however who said tourism was painless?  We approached the port entrance at 0400 hrs and saw the swell running towards the beach but as I was expecting the outer breakwater protected the entrance in the way it should and there were no issues.  Port Control was awake, the pilot was on time, the tugboats were in position (more to prevent their piers from being hit by the ship, than to help out) and all was well in the world.  With a great “lightning show” in the distance we sailed in with wind still weather into the port.  Swung around in the basin and went astern to the cruise terminal, which here is a floating pontoon. A great idea as we never have to fuss with the gangway because of the changing tide. By 0500 the gangway was out, 15 minutes later the guests started to stream ashore and by 0610 the airplane was in the air.  All went like clockwork and I went back to bed. Caught myself another two hours of sleep as I needed to be at my best for departure, where we have to make an S turn to get out of the breakwater and we drift enormously on the wind, which is then full on the beam. So no margin for error.

Yesterday I mentioned the time zone that we will have to deal with during our December cruise. Normally Time Zones pop up when you travel East/West. The clock has to be back or forward to stay in tune with the sun. Eventually you lose a day (when going west, but you gain hours night by night) or you gain a day (when going east, but loose hours night by night). We are going to do it vertically, e.g. during a North to South run. This has to do with a very peculiar Date Line situation in the area between Hawaii and Tahiti.  When we do our South Pacific cruise we are in Hawaiian waters where it is Monday, then we go to Kirimati (Christmas Island) where it is Tuesday and then we go to Bora Bora were it is Monday again.  (If you could do it all in one day)

If you look at the little map, you see where the dateline has this strange “bulge” to the right around the Kiribati area. We sail straight through there and thus we have to do a dateline change while going north to south, instead of going east/west.  The plan is now to cancel 4 December. We hop from December 3 to December 5 and then have a December 6a and a December 6b to get back into the calendar again for the rest of the cruise. We could also stay in ships time, have a sea day on December 4 and call at Kirimati on our own date, December 5^th.  and hardly anybody would notice it. I do not expect big signs in the port of Kirimati advising everybody that they live on a different date than the surrounding area. But the dateline happening has been announced in the cruise brochure and thus we do one.  Why is it important for the Hotelmanager?, well he is planning a lot of extra activities that we do not do on normal cruises and thus he needs to know what day I will officially cancel. Doing it at the last moment would play havoc with his planning; and also would upset the Bingo and the latter we have to avoid at all times.  I think he is going to throw a deck party, called “lost in paradise” or something.

With that major hurdle out of the way, he can now plan for all the sea days and all that goes with it. My interest is more short term at the moment, why does the forecast for Panama give so little rain. I had a whole lecture from the Panama Canal pilot last cruise about the rainy season starting, so I have been keeping an eye on the weather in Panama City but apart from a shower in the afternoon, it is (still) mostly dry.  That is fine for me, especially as we will be there two days from now for an evening call.  It is a short stop already and if you then get wet as well, it sort of spoils the fun.

Tomorrow we will have a day at sea and the weather looks great. Calm seas with the occasional rain shower possible which we will try to keep in the distance by sailing around it if possible. Temperatures will reach the tropical levels again.