We’ve had a few house guests ask about our Ship’s Bell clock, and what the chimes mean. While the pattern is very simple once you see it laid out, it’s difficult to understand if you you have it explained.
Envision you are working as crew on a ship. Someone needs to be awake 24×7, watching the ship as it glides through the water. Laying out a duty roster, the clock is divided into eight sections, known as Watches, of four hours each (thus 24hrs in a day), so Watches start at midnight, 4am, 8am, noon, 4pm, and 8pm. You can’t tell the Watch, and thus the section of the day or night you are in from the chimes, but you can tell the part of each Watch you are in from the chart below.
Note that the start of each Watch has 8 bells (midnight, 4am, 8am, etc) which is really the end of one Watch and the start of another. In ship parlance, if your Watch started at midnight, your “first bell” would be at 12:30am, which would be 1 bell strike. Over the course of your Watch the bell count would increase, until 8 bells when your Watch was over.