Does anybody know what time it is?

7º 00.188s 134º 10.159w

Sat May 04 2019

Does anyone really care? Dah dah dah. . .
Sorry Doobie Brothers, and I really did enjoy seeing you guys in concert.

Thad just crashed and I’m on watch. We exchanged pleasantries, a few jocularities (more about that in a moment) and our observations about his 3 hours at work. A couple of sneaker waves. He did his laundry. No rain, no autopilot malfunctions, no real sail trim changes, no ship traffic (are we the only people left on the planet?), nothing broke, etc. Then off to his rack he went, and he deserves some decent rest.

Isabel and I’ve been sleeping in the master cabin forward, and when the seas get too rowdy or our sail plan is too aggressive, it gets loud and noisy and difficult to sleep. It’s important to come on watch feeling rested. I slept well last night, albeit with the assistance of ear plugs.

We’ve slowed down just a little. After a blistering 7.9 knots SOG average for a 24 hour period (funny part just ahead) we’re now averaging 7.5 knots since midnight. That’s still fast in these messy seas and it’s important for Thad to sleep, so reef 2 will remain in place at least until we get fresh weather in a few hours. We’ll also confer with Jamie about anything he can see that our econo version of PredictWind doesn’t reveal.

To me, La Cruz is a geographical oddity (no, it’s not 2 weeks from everywhere), with respect to time zones, so we were on Central time (UTC-5). It was getting light really late, and of course getting dark later than we like. As we were a bit North in latitude the days were longer than they are now. About 2 days into our voyage we decided to rectify this, and simply rolled the ship’s clock to Pacific time, which was UTC-7. That adjusted sunrise to around 0700, a much more civilized time of day. As we’ve traveled South towards and across the equator, the days have gotten shorter to a more natural 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, but as we’re also moving West, sunrise has kept migrating later and later into the morning.

If our intel is correct, Nuka Hiva is one of those wierd places where the local time is UTC - 9.5 hours. To help us adapt to that, we rolled the ship’s clock back an hour yesterday, and today we’re doing it again. Isabel volunteered to eat that hour yesterday, and I’m doing it today, precluding a change to the posted watch schedule. Tomorrow we’ll bite off the final half hour with one of Thad’s watches.

One could view this as a technicality, but more important is to observe our biorythms and normalize our days to the local environs. Psychologically it just feels right to have sunrise around 0700ish, and sunset around 1900. Just feels civilized. I’m betting it will also help us adjust our sleep patterns to get more effective rest.

That funny thing? Both Isabel and Thad asked me to photograph the chart plotter log at midnight last night to document our fastest day ever. I set an alarm for 2359 and clicked away as the clock rolled midnight. Then I reviewed the images. Apparently down in these Southern latitudes the days are 25 hours long! None of us had thought it through, but as we rolled the clocks back yesterday our trusty B&G happily assumed that day to be an extra hour long.

Well shucks. 198 miles in 25 hours is still pretty stinkin’ fast in a little 38’ cat.