Advance and retard of clocks at sea,

[Tony Wilding]

HI, i cant remember if it was an average of 2o minutes per watch , or per day, on an average ten knot ship, ? must be a huge advance and retard now on very fast container ships, lose or gain a lot of sleep.

[E.Martin]

As far as I can remember 1 hour a night 20 minutes a watch lots
of people getting it wrong.

[Albert Bishop]

Remember how the second mate would come round every so often and advance or retard the clocks, and always rounded the time off to maybe thirty or sixty minutes. Then we got a "Mr Properly" second mate on one ship who would come and alter the clocks exactly, by daft times like twenty three minutes or seven minutes
untill everyone was completly confused, I think the skipper eventually had a word with him and we all got back to normal. Albi

[j.sabourn]

Know when I was 2nd. Mate used to adjust clocks to make noon approx. 10 minutes before 1200 hrs. so as to work out your running fix and get down for lunch at 12. As regards clock adjustments re fast moving ships on due east and west courses, remember 15 degrees of longitude equals 1 hr. on the equator this would be 900 miles, would be less in higher or lower latitudes. I suppose if clocks have to be adjusted they just have to do. Although I suppose on passenger ships it would not make any difference what time of day it was to them. Cheers John Sabourn

[Paul Steel]

I seem to recall we used to do ours by the hour. They also would be put back by one hour one evening and then forward again the next evening or vice versa.
On most ships, in the engine room we would advance or retard the clock by 20 mins for the watch.
On the Dart container ships it was all handled from the bridge with centralised clocks. So at midnight the clock would advance 1 hour, the next watch would start at 0440, and then 0820 and the reverse for clocks going back.

The number of times people got it wrong and came down early was a lot. Of course if they were late you gave them a call.

One time we left Le Havre for Southampton and just changed the clocks when we arrived.