Nick's Semester @ Sea: The Lost Day

Time: 00:15

Date: Thursday 4^th Feb 2010

Lat: 25° 20.4 N

Lon: 170° 36.8 E

Speed: 19 knots

Course: 278°

When I go to bed tonight it will be Tuesday February 2, 2010, and when I wake up the calender will read Thursday February 4th. Now in the past that might not have been an unusual occurrence that was undoubtedly caused by a bed that was just too darn comfortable. But,... this anomaly will be caused by our crossing of the International Date Line (IDL). Of course I needed some explanation of this. For example, if you cross the date line at precisely midnight, going westward, you skip an entire day - while going eastward, you repeat the entire day. The International Date Line (IDL) is an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth opposite the Prime Meridian where the date changes as one travels east or west across it. Roughly along 180° longitude, with diversions to pass around some territories and island groups. the rule mostly corresponds to the time zone boundary separating −12 and +12 hours Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (Greenwich Mean Time – GMT). Crossing the IDL traveling east results in a day (24 hrs) being subtracted, so the traveler repeats the date. Crossing west results in a day being added. The exact number of hours depends on the time zones. Since we are circumnavigating the globe going westward, every 15° or roughly 1000 miles that we travel, we gain an hour. So if we kept changing time zones and gaining hours when we got to Ft. Lauderdale we would not be the same time as them. I was still a little confused on the subject so I looked it up on Wikipedia. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_dateline .

On a lighter note, I saw the moon rise out of the pitch black horizon at about 10pm tonight. It was quite a sight! A fellow student was playing her bagpipes on deck while this was all happening, so that experience was pretty cool. We have no classes today, not sure why. The staff took this as an opportunity to get a group photo of everyone on board. We did this on the aft-deck .

Everyone pretty much is just laying around and enjoying one of our last days of sun and warm tropical weather. I hope to catch up on my school work and reading, and then a bit of relaxing. Starting tomorrow it's going to be a rigorous four days of school. Because of our Asia Adventures (Japan, China, Vietnam, India), we only have 7 days of class in the month of February!

I was chosen to be the Chair of the Sea Olympics. This should be a big challenge to plan. But also a lot of fun I'm sure! This is a bigger version of our GIHS “Student Olympics”. The event pits the different Halls (Seas) against each other. There is a big Opening Ceremony with a lot of sea pride going on. Then we'll have quite a number of events, such as but not limited to tug-of-war, pie eating contest, SAS academic bowl. The Grand Finale is a ship wide relay race that I am to do all the logistics by myself.
The Sea Olympics event is going to be held March 7^th

Another activity I am involved with is the SAS Auction Committee. We are soliciting donated items to be auctioned for the purpose of raising money to pay for future scholarships, to help fund current voyagers who wish to donate their time to charity activities such as Habitat for Humanity projects and to help with the overall maintenance of the ship. We will gladly accept and appreciate any type of gift you would be willing to donate for the auction. As you may or may not know my Mother and Father will be joining me in Vietnam starting the third last week in February. So you can contact them and they will help coordinate the delivery of any donations. We will gladly accept anything you can donate.

Everyone on the ship is quite anxious to get to Japan. Ship life is pretty laid back and there is a lot of down time. So everyone is anxious to get off the boat and explore. It is going to be one crazy month! I will update everyone probably once more before I get to Japan. Hope all is well back home and keep the emails coming…

Interesting facts:
It is about 69 miles in between each degree on a map
I now have an "extended" family - a whole bunch of sisters, compliments of SAS. I will introduce you to them in my next blog.