Race 10 - Day 20
Crew Diary - Race 10 Day 20
17 April

International Date Line

We are sailing along at 173 degrees East and 41 degrees North on the 11th of April, normally this would be information that I would mindlessly jot down in our ship's log before going to the far more interesting things like how far we have gone in the last hour. But today this has a much greater significance for me, we are approaching three milestones for me in this race.

I was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand but have always considered our family home in the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand. In the next couple of hours, we will sail over the longitude of our family home, only 4596 nautical miles south of me. I had my 41st birthday on board the boat two days ago, and whilst I am in the middle of one of the most remote places on earth it feels nice to know that home is just to the south of me.

Speaking of my birthday, I was sailing around the bottom of Japan and had the sudden thought, how fast do we need to go for me to get two birthdays? I got on the Timezero program on the nav computer and started working it out, the unfortunate answer was we needed to maintain an 11.3-knot average for the next 10 days to reach the international date line in time, so while we can occasionally have that sort of pace for a few days we were never going to maintain that long enough. In fairness, I was only hoping for this to greedily demand two birthday cakes, not the most altruistic of motivations.

A big thing for me as a circumnavigator is the meaning of ‘halfway’. On this long and winding journey around the globe that we do on the Clipper Race, there are many halfway points. There is the halfway in time, about two thirds of the way between Airlie Beach and Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam, there is halfway by distance and then there has always been for me the idea of the International Date Line, which is not as some crew have suggested, a type of dating service for the jet set, much like Clipper Race is known as the world's most adventurous dating service, but I digress The International Date Line represents the crossing point from east to west, it also represents the crossing point for me of leaving and coming home, from now until the end of the race the longitude number will slowly decrease until we reach the end of our journey. (There are a few exceptions to this, the most interesting of which is the Panama Canal which when crossing from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean actually runs west to east, well southeast to northwest but still.) So, whilst we are two thirds of the way through this race around the planet, in a little over a day I will finally feel like the finish line is closer than the start.