My first memory of time zones is from 1981. I was 10yo. We lived in Bullhead City, AZ for a bit. My Dad worked for Don Laughlin (the founder of Laughlin, NV) as a private pilot and blackjack dealer. AZ is mountain time and didn’t do daylight savings time. My memory is that Dad left for work at 3:50pm AZ time to be at work at 3:00pm NV time. Something like that. My child brain found this fascinating! He also took a ferry across the Colorado River to work.
Then, as a teen, my Anglophile-self wore two watches. One set to FL time, where I lived, and the other to London time, where I wished I lived. Fast forward decades and with family and friends spread out across the USA, I got used to calling people at the right time. (Remember calling people???) My last job was for a multi-national company. My Outlook calendar was set to PST, CST, and Australia-Sydney (I think, I’m already forgetting things about work).
I was and am one of those people who would prefer to stick to a time. Let’s do Daylights Savings or standard. I don’t care. Just stop me with my internal clock! So I was super excited this Spring Forward that Mexico, where I am living now, stopped with the back & forth! YAYAY!
Not so fast.
So, we were in Ensenada on 12 March 2023, in the Pacific time zone. However, since they are a border town with very close ties to California, they decided to continue doing daylight savings. So yes, spring forward. Then we departed for Bahia Tortugas and Bahia Magdalena. These areas are Pacific, no daylight savings. However, we didn’t have a cell connection so our phones, wall clock, computers, and Garmin InReach were not in sync. Mark and I had to declare what time we were going to follow until we got to Cabo San Lucas where it is Mountain time, no daylight savings. Everything is synched. All is well.
Turns out, even tho the Garmin InReach was consistently an hour ahead of everything else on the boat, it was wrong. As we round Los Cabos and start heading north in the Gulf of California and this fall during fall back time, we will have more fun with time zone maths.
For now, Mountain and Pacific with DST are the same–UTC-7.
But, let’s not forget that some of the sailing weather files we use are in UTC (or GMT, which I think are synonymous). So I’m learning that too. All this while also not having lived for 50yrs in this country and not having a pretty solid grasp of which state is in which time zone. I don’t even know the states of Mexico! Except here is BCS or Baja California Sur.
The short part of this story is that time is hard.
image source: https://daylight-savings.com/zones/mx/