Hey All!
As the title suggests, we are blasting Led Zeppelin tonight as Challenger flies north through the numerous sea mounts that stretch up into shallows. Dave was able to create a very helpful kmz overlay highlighting the problematic areas that lie ahead. With the location of the way point, and our proximity to the warm eddy to our north, it looks like we are set up nearly perfectly to to curl through the trouble areas as we continue our way to the north.
And to the North, Silbo is continuing to push along, making about 12 km progress per day.
As I had mentioned earlier, for the past week now, there has been a lot of discussion on where we should fly Silbo, as making our way south to the horn of Brazil is seeming to more difficult than we originally thought. We ran some numbers over the past few days, and battery wise, we have roughly 290 days left. If we were to continue to try and fly south returning to a progress of 6 km/ day and taking into account the degradation of our velocity due to growth on our hulls, we most likely would fall short of our goal. However, if we were to our way point to the north west, we could make good progress as we take advantage of the current we have been fighting for months on end and shift our finish line to either the northern edge of Brazil, or, the lower Antilles such as Barbados. These options are well within reach as we could potentially see speeds upwards of 20 km / day allowing us to arrive in mid to late July.
This discussion will continue as we arrive at a decision of where the most ideal place would be for a cleaning and rebattery for Silbo.
Force Wind Sea & Honor