Time Travellers are we.
It’s birthday time again! Today we celebrate
Sam’s birthday and our watch started merrily, as it always does at midnight,
with nachos, beer and hot chocolate (with a small sippy of rum from Jan!) Today
has been much the same as others, grey with a hint of more grey and drizzle with
a side helping of rain…the wind is still here and fluctuates between light and
medium, we are doing 8 knots in a northeasterly direction with all the sails set
and very little swell. 586 miles to go!
In light of the fact that there
is not much to report from our daily goings-on (apart from seriously epic bread
this lunchtime) we thought we would explain a little about our time travelling
behaviour in this log book. So far this trip we have come all the way from New
Zealand time which is UT (Universal Time from London) +12 hours to now, which is
UT-5. Our journey has seen us cross over the International Date Line (approx 180
degrees in longitude, give or take due to various islands…including the
Chatham Islands) which meant that Friday became Friday again! Technically we are
all a day older than we say we are!! Another whole days worth of beard growing,
not showering and eating! As we have travelled Eastwards time has slowly changed
as well, an hour here…another hour there. Without getting too complicated it’s
an hour to change every 15 degrees we travel (360 degrees round the earth, 24
hours…15 degrees = 1hr of time) When we usually encounter time change on long
haul flights etc, it doesn’t make much sense to our bodies but here it really
effects our lives – the sun rises at unusual times during our watch and plunges
the 8-12ers into darkness far too early if we are out a bit! Of course now we
are so far south we are only really getting 4 hours of true night but anywho –
it’s good to be on correct times! We won’t get jetlagged in the Falklands so
another bonus there! (saying this we will have to adapt to the fact that all of
us are well into watch rhythms…We fully expect to find red watch in the
kitchen at 2am hunting for noodles!)
As the degrees fly by we are closer
and closer to having sailed an entire quarter of the globe, a whole 90 degrees
in longitude! It’s just over 3 weeks since we left our last bit of land and for
nearly all of us this is the longest we’ve spent at sea! Which also means we are
running out of breaking news stories…soon we will have to invent wild goings
on, bizarre current affairs bulletins or just create some drama ourselves but
for now we are quite happy with it being Friday and a birthday day…plus I can
tell you now, when it stops raining you will be the first to hear about it! In
all seriousness though we know we are on the brink of exciting – the mile
counter is trickling down and we all know what awaits when it hits 000, then the
final push towards the 50 degree barrier (to comply with an official ’rounding
of cape horn’) and then, the Falklands! Grass, hills, sheep and a pub or two!
Oh, and OTHER PEOPLE…golly gosh
Maybe this will prove too much
excitement for one day…back outside we go to ‘normality’ and grey with only a
little bit of our watch left before the warmth downstairs and our bunks. With
love, Red Watch
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