Lets see, in the dailies found here
http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Niku7/niku7dailies2.html#n708
Pat says "They should arrive at Nikumaroro in the wee hours of Thursday, July 12, local time. They will begin immediately to map the primary search area with the Multi-Beam; if it’s still dark when they finish that, they’ll do a lap around the island (about two hours) to generate a general profile of the reef."
Since local Niku time is UCT +13, that means they should be arriving about now = UCT Weds July 11, 1400 hrs. Should be 3 am Niku Time, July 12th (Did I get that right?), and they just might have fish in the water by now.
Happy fishing, hook the big one.
Andrew
Actually, we have here a similar situation to what AE faced with Itasca at Howland Island, where the ship used a different local time from those on the island, and AE was using GMT. It gets all confused.
Each night, I've been plotting the lat/long in Google Earth that Pat has put on the webpage, watching the slooooow progress in a "perfectly" straight line of about 213 degrees out of Honolulu (for Ric's sake, it passes comfortably offshore McKean, and headed for the west of Niku). I've also been comparing her figures to what KoK's daily report is saying (and that seems to conform to the way other vessels I've traveled on) to be a noon-time posting. So some of my pushpins on GE have "local time" and others say "EDT". (For a nice GE view, see
what Rick Jones has just posted. I wonder how many of us have been doing the same surrepticiously! ;-) )
In Pat's posting last night that you reference, she spoke of them crossing the equator yesterday (Tuesday) at about 10 minutes before 2 p.m. ship-time. On the
daily report of KoK, they wrote
POSITION: LAT: 00-13.7 N LONG: 171-30.2 W
MILES RUN: 217 NM
TOTAL MILES RUN: 1495 NM AV. SPD 9.0 @ 230 RPM
DISTANCE TO GO: 349 NM
CROSSING EQUATOR AT APPROX 1400 HRS.
WE SHOULD ARRIVE ON STATION NIKUMARORO IS. APPROX 0300 7/12/12.
SHIP AND CREW DOING FINE.
(BTW, for weekend noon reports, the daily postings usually don't appear until Monday or Tuesday. So I guess it's a manual process involving someone back in Honolulu to update that webpage.)
Anthony has just posted something while I've been composing this that sounds right from what I can discern. From the "APPROX 0300 7/12/12" in yesterday's (local) noon posting, I infer that they aren't (yet) considering themselves to be on the other side of the virtual Kiribati dateline. Whether they're using Honolulu time, or have pushed their clocks back an hour or two, is unknown to me. But I'm expecting that as I'm watching TV late tonight, KoK will be slipping past McKean in the mid-afternoon (ship's time). And when I wake up tomorrow, she'll be carefully preparing to avoid the fringing reef of Niku in the dark of about 3 a.m. (ship's time). Paraphrasing the late Rodney King, "Can't we all use GMT/UCT?"