Boating Bible Manual of Seamanship

As well as Earth Hour taking place on Saturday evening, it’s also the end of daylight saving for us here in Australia. Daylight saving ends next Sunday, 5 April in Australia – see blog post dated 30 March. This will mean the end of our season of twilight races, which are always a good way to end the day. In the case of our yacht club, they end the working week – Friday twilights just blow the troubles of the week away.

In the Northern Hemisphere, conversely, daylight saving is just beginning. In the USA, it started on the second Sunday in March. The European Union makes the change this Sunday, 29 March.

Most of us these days rely on our computers to know when to change the time. When Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympic Games, daylight saving started on 27 August and we had to correct our computers manually.

Isn’t it lucky that the maritime world works by UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), formerly known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)?

Tags: Coordinated Universal Time, daylight saving, Earth Hour, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, twilight races, UTC

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Grab Bag or Miscellany, Navigation and Passage Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.