In the past I have commented on the last night at sea; the end of a passage. The first night is vastly different in numerous ways. One is that the entire experience seems unnatural; after being at anchor or in sheltered waters for a month or more you are not accustomed to the motion of the boat at sea. In port the boat seldom moves noticeably, at sea it is seldom not moving in at least 3 directions; forward, rolling side to side and pitching up and down with the waves. It takes a while to get accustomed to it, eventually it seems very natural and one wonders what all the stumbling around was about. Tonight is no different except for a few things. We have all the above and a crew who has not sailed together. We have, as usual watch schedules, divided into three four-hour watches of 12 to 4, 4 to 8 and 8 to 12. That part is usually pretty easy but tonight we are having a hard time figuring out what time it is. I know that sounds like we are not very bright, four adults that can�'t tell time? First of all, you need to know what we use for clocks. The ships clock, which is an 8-day key wind clock is always on local time, the battery powered clock in the navigation station is always set to UTC. Most of us keep our watch set to local time and all the preceding are changed manually. Then we have the cell phone, tablet and computer clocks that we tend to rely on for accuracy. Normally that is pretty good and easy, but not tonight. Here is the rest of the story. Tonga was scheduled to go on Daylight Savings Time this past Saturday. You may recall we were skulking around because of our failed fuel delivery Friday so we did not get the word; fact is no one really got the word that the King had cancelled daylight savings time late Friday afternoon. When I first heard about it this morning I thought no big thing, I will simply set my watch back to where it was. Not quite as easy, it turns out. Our phones and computers and other electronic devices are all programmed to switch to the correct time based on our location. I was surprised that this laptop changed the time even though it had no connection to the internet. I learned that all these electronic gadgets are programmed to know when any time zone or country changes it�'s time. Since this cancellation of Daylight Savings Time was a spur of the moment decision most, but not all electronic devices did not get the word. So depending on what we are looking at it is either 0215, 0315 or 0415. I have decided that when the sun comes up and the crew is all up I will decree, as Captain, that we are on New Zealand time (0315 Wednesday) and do away with this confusion. If the King can do it, so can I. Otherwise it is a great night for sailing. Even though the sky is very cloudy the light from the full moon (almost) provides enough light to give us a horizon, the wind is about 20-25 kts and coming from just aft of the beam, seas are about 2-3 meters also aft of the beam, so we are rolling along at about 8 kts. These conditions won�'t last but we will enjoy them while we can. Interestingly, if we had been at sea for a few days the motion of the boat would be really easy and pleasant, but since it is our first night at sea everyone has a tough time moving around, or getting comfortable in their bunk when they are off watch and some of the items of gear we don�'t think about very often are moving about and need to be stowed a bit better. In the morning. More later