Monday, October 30th – Sea Day

Time zone shifting – you know that great feeling you get from gaining an extra hour of sleep in the fall, and the complete opposite dread when you lose it again in the spring? But you deal with it because, after all, it’s only once a year, right?

Imagine trying to deal with it two or three times EVERY week, and you’ll understand a bit of what life is like on the ms Veendam. On my first ship, we only crossed into the Central Time Zone once a week, and it was consistent – every Wednesday. Then we’d come right back to the Eastern Time Zone, so we never bothered to change clocks, we just called it “ship time” to follow Eastern Time even if we were presently in the Central Time Zone.

Well, the ms Veendam does not follow a regular schedule. Six weeks ago it was in Alaska, and over the next month or so, it traveled down the West coast all the way down to the Panama Canal. So every two or three days they kept crossing into eastern-more time zones – which means that every two or three days, they’d lose ANOTHER hour of sleep. Yikes!

Luckily, my contract here will not be that bad. We’ll remain in the Eastern and Western Caribbean until I leave in mid-January, but we’ll still change clocks every time we come back and forth between the Eastern and Central Time Zones.