time and location...

It is 2210 ship time on Easter Sunday, April 12 (the first of two Easters) as I start this...
Latitude: 34 degrees 20.28' N
Longitude: 155 degrees 3.05' E
Course: 100 degrees

The International Date Line is at 180 degrees longitude and we will reach it in a few hours. Currently we are 15 hours ahead of EDT, 16 hours ahead of CDT, 17 hours ahead of MDT, 18 hours ahead of PDT. Once we cross the date line, we will be behind everyone -- 9 hours behind EDT, 8 hours behind CDT, 7 hours behind MDT, 6 hours behind PDT, until April 15 when we advance another hour closer to each time zone. We are definitely moving closer to home!

Seas coming out of Yokohama were quite calm, and although there is a fair bit more motion today, it is either not as bad as the Atlantic crossing, or we have become better sailors. I did see a few seasick patches behind people's ears today, but not many. The constant rocking and the time changes of the last couple of days caused me to be very sleepy today, but I will be happy if it does not get any worse than this.

We have a Dean's Memo that comes out each day we are at sea, and it usually contains an article called "From the Crow's Nest" with some interesting facts about sea travel, birds, geography and so on. Yesterday's explained the concept of a "great circle", the shortest distance between two points on a sphere's surface. This explains why sometimes the shortest distance requires moving in a direction that is not intuitive. There is a website http://gc.kls2.com/ where you can enter the airport codes for Yokohama and Honolulu (YOK-HNL) in the first box and see the route we are taking. For those of you who like to explore these things there are other variables you can play with on that page as well.

Now that we have several days at sea and the trip is drawing to a close, students are very involved in writing papers and preparing for exams. Professors are marking assignments and putting the exams together. There are only 10 class days left and the remaining days are study days or exam days. The two stops we have left are only two days each, and people are starting to anticipate and talk about how they think they will feel at the end of the journey.