The Day Time Stood Still

The Insignia left Kushiro, Japan on June 25 (Day 163). We said goodbye to Japan, and headed across the Pacific Ocean for Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

The itinerary outlined four sea days to reach Dutch Harbor on June 30 (Day 168). I look forward to sea days. I enjoy the activities (bridge lessons and games, lectures on the areas we visited rebroadcast on the TV, team trivia, evening dinners and some shows). I also enjoy a more relaxed pace than the port days, when the focus is on getting off for the shore visits.

What got lost for me in that overview itinerary, however, was that we did not have four sea days, we actually had five.

We crossed the international date line on June 28 (Day 166). Coming from west to east, crossing the date line means that you add a day. We essentially had two June 28ths on the trip.

I first caught on to this when friends from my trivia group invited me to their anniversary dinner on June 28 (the second June 28). This dinner was special because one of the couple is a BIG collector of sea shells. She created a centerpiece on our table that night of some of the many shells she had collected and purchased during the trip.

The ship normally has all restaurant reservations in a computer system, but for this second (extra) June 28, the system was entirely a paper record. Since there were two June 28ths, these friends decided to celebrate with dinners on both evenings, allowing them to invite twice as many people…. An added bonus.

There wasn’t a big ceremony for crossing the date line, but we did get an official certificate:

In many ways, this second June 28 was like any other day. Normal sea time activities were scheduled. It was strange and remarkable, however. For some reason I am glad to have had the experience.

When we left Japan, we were thirteen hours ahead of the time in New York City. We have been ahead of the US time from the whole trip. Once we left Japan, however, we started an unrelenting daily time change process. Each night, we moved the clock forward one hour as we sailed east (one night it even went forward two hours).

On the night of the first June 28, we went from being ahead of the US time to now being behind US time. When we reached Dutch Harbor Alaska on June 30, we had completed the ship’s transition to Alaska time, which is four hours behind Eastern Standard US Time. That, also, is a strange adjustment after six months of thinking of it the other way around.

I do not recommend this method of time change. The morning we arrived in Dutch Harbor, it seemed every passenger I met was walking around in a fog. Almost all had tales of difficulty getting to sleep.

I don’t know if studies have been done about the impact of the series of one hour time changes we did. I did find that the body can take five to six days to adjust to losing just one hour, so it makes sense that this amount of change would be a big impact. I can report that five days later in Dutch Harbor, people around the ship seem less bleary. Some are still reporting sleep difficulties, however. So much for anecdotal research.