I Don't Know What Day It Is
19 August 2015 | En Route Beveridge Reef to Tonga
Megan
I have always had trouble recalling the date at any given time. Even when working in an office, I would have to refer to the desk calendar every time a date was needed on a document. But since leaving Port Townsend, this trouble is worsening and spreading. One well known and discussed malady among cruisers is the inability to recall what day of the week it is. Mondays blur with Thursdays, blur with Sundays, and most every day could qualify as a Saturday when referenced with the world we came from. And so it was that soon after departing the world of the working, I lost track also of the day of the week and have not been able to recall one readily for months, it seems.
When this began, I thought it a bad thing, but I had no idea where things were headed. Last week Matthew and I had a serious five minute discussion about what year it is. I was certain it was 2015 until Matthew questioned me with nearly as much certainty and we realized we had almost no experiences writing checks or flipping the page on the calendar to have helped reinforce the year in our minds. We did, eventually - thanks to the wonders of modern technology - settle that dispute and are again firmly rooted in the year 2015.
But then, just yesterday, we were on our third day out sailing from Beveridge Reef, northwest and had what will be, I am certain, the most confusing experience of our voyage. We crossd the international dateline.(We had hoped to stop at the small country of Niue, but unfortunately bad weather in next week's forecast pushed us to move west faster and seek a more protected anchorage in the Vavau group of Tonga, so perhaps we will see Niue another time...)
At one point in time, Matthew and I sat down and talked through why a dateline is necessary. Why, if there are 24 time zones, doesn't the time just change by one hour every time you cross one? Through a long conversation involving diagrams and sweeping gestures with our hands, we did eventually sort it out. But that was way back in California and now we're in the middle of the ocean, not having slept for more than 3.5 hours at a time for three days and have completely forgotten again why that's the case.
For the time being, I'm not even trying to figure out what day it is. When we arrive in Tonga, I'll lean on my crutch - the iPad - to do the heavy thinking for me and untangle what day and time it is, then maybe one day we'll have the energy to figure out again just where that 23 hours we skipped ahead went...