Island Hopping Across the Pacific Ocean, Part One: The Ocean

This morning as I began another day cruising across the Pacific Ocean, the scene outside my stateroom window was much the same as the past several mornings.  The sun was covered by billowy layers of clouds, and the sea was gently undulating with an occasional white cap as a wave broke. As the day has gone along, the wind has picked up, and there are more white caps among the waves. The ship rocks gently, not so much that it makes me ill, but enough to keep me aware that we are on the ocean.

The calm waters of the Pacific Ocean

 

 There is a straight line where the sky and ocean meet.  It is easy to see why early peoples believed the earth to be flat.  There is no hint of a contour to the horizon.  Even though I can’t see evidence of it, I know that the world is indeed round and that the sun travels around it each day.  We received a reminder of this in the ship’s daily briefing paper “Reflections” which was left on my bed last night.  The headline read “The International Dateline:  Today is Thursday, Tomorrow is Saturday.”  There followed an explanation of the imaginary line drawn from Greenwich, England around the globe.  Actually, we won’t cross over this line (180 degrees or halfway around the world from Greenwich) until the afternoon of our non-Friday, but rather than switch days midstream, we were told that on the Crystal Symphony, it would be Saturday all day.  Friday will simply vanish.

Each day begins west of the International Dateline and ends east of the line.  In discussing this phenomenon over drinks, my friends from New Zealand said that they have always been proud to be the first ones to greet each new day as it dawns.  Today, before we cross the International Dateline, my world clock says that I am five time zones behind my home in Arizona; tomorrow, I miraculously will be nineteen time zones ahead. 

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the earth’s oceans, covering some sixty million square miles from China to the Americas.  It is hard to fathom how vast this ocean is, but according to National Geographic, if all of the earth’s land masses were put together, the conglomerate would still be smaller than the Pacific Ocean.  We are sailing over the North Pacific.  We will come close to, but not cross the Equator on this voyage.  The ocean on the other side of that second imaginary line is known as the South Pacific.  

It is a lonely voyage with very few sightings of land, birds, or passing ships.  In fact, passing another ship is so rare, other than when we are near a port, that our ship’s captain made an unprecedented announcement one morning over the loud speakers to say that another ship was approaching.  I was in a photography class at the time.  All one hundred or so of us left the auditorium and crowded around the windows to see this other ship.  According to the captain, the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was passing about a mile away from us on its way home to San Diego after a ten-month deployment around the world with its crew of six thousand sailors. 

The USS Abraham Lincoln passes by

Our ship sailed for five days, at an average speed of twenty knots (or twenty-three miles per hour), covering about five hundred miles per day, to reach the first of the Hawaiian Islands.  (An airplane can make the 2,600-mile transit from San Diego to Honolulu in about five hours.)   It took the ship another five days to reach a second group of some twenty thousand islands known collectively as Micronesia. 

The first view of land in five days: Molokai, Hawaii

Given the vastness of the ocean that surrounds me, I am in awe of those early peoples who managed to paddle the canoes that brought early inhabitants to these isolated islands.  I have been reading a book about The Great Ocean, by David Igler, and in so doing have developed an appreciation for its immensity and history.  Before Europeans arrived in the Pacific Ocean, people had traveled from Asia, Australia, and Polynesia to settle on some islands and had established trade routes between islands, using prevailing ocean currents as marine “highways.”

The first European explorer to “discover” these islands was Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the western-most islands, including the Philippines and Guam, for Spain in 1520.  Two hundred years later, the British explorer James Cook made three trips around the tip of South America and across the Pacific, creating detailed maps of the lands he found and “discovering” Hawaii.   The Europeans established trade relationships with islanders, took some as slaves, and shared a variety of diseases such as typhoid, small pox, syphilis, and gonorrhea decimating many native populations.  Captain Cook was murdered by Hawaiians on his third voyage, thus ending his illustrious career as an explorer.

Unlike the ships sailed by those early explorers, I am traversing the ocean in luxury.  Our ship, the Crystal Symphony, is described in company materials as “a sanctuary of refined style.”  It’s 848 guests can expect to enjoy “the most gracious hospitality at sea,” provided by a well-trained crew of 545.  I undertook this lengthy voyage across the immense Pacific Ocean at the encouragement of my friend Ruth, a cruiser of much experience.  She lobbied for the forty-seven-day voyage from San Diego to Singapore.  I opted for the shorter thirty-two-day version, ending in Hong Kong.  While we locked in a very good price for the cruise (in Ruth’s words, “a smokin’ deal”), I agreed to sail as a way to get to places that otherwise I might never have an opportunity to visit.  While I have visited Hawaii and Vietnam several times, I have not been to the other ports included in this cruise itinerary:  the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Guam, Saipan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong (now changed to Taiwan).  Stay tuned for descriptions of these island visits in the second part of this post.