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Another video and strong going for the Wholffs
17:25 p.m. EST Nov 2, 2003
Team Atlantic Whollf's are doing great. Not only are they the current tech champs of the race, they have also positioned themselves at number 4.
When the race began, three of the teams (Atlantic Wholff, Team rowing home and Bluebellwood) took off with ExplorersWeb's Contact 2.0. "If all goes well, for the first time, we'll be able to follow the rowers day by day with live dispatches and pics and get a true feeling of what it's actually like to row an Atlantic ocean" we wrote.
And here we are: Team Rowing home did the first text and pic dispatch from the race, Bluebell transmits text and/or voice almost daily - and Wholff has done two videos only two weeks into the race!
It hasn't been easy. The organizers reported early that the fleet had power problems. Atlantic Wholff confirmed: "We have narrowed down the culprit to the tracking device (!) used to plot our position so that is now switched off for good and we telephone our position twice daily to the safety vessel."
Next there was the big solar storms interfering with airline-, army-, oil rig-, and expedition communications. Reports the rowers: "After a couple of very frustrating days when almost all our technology refused to work we are now able again to send updates and receive text messages.
And more gadgets problems: "Our low point came when the screen on our pager failed as we had been getting a great morale boost from the messages sent." (All teams have pagers provided by the organizers to send daily logs to the race website.) The crew has now resorted to SMS on their sat phone: Please keep the messages coming via the Iridium site - this really is the only way to contact us and we will answer your questions in future updates.
Rowing is hard enough. Edge technology while rowing takes the challenge to a new level. But this crew master both at the moment:
"The last few days have seen our fortunes change, with flat calm giving way to strong easterly winds which suits our route just fine. As a result our mileage is up and we finally feel we are on our way.
As far as we know we are still fourth which is excellent news. When we spoke to the safety vessel this morning after a cold and bruising night we learnt that we are about 100 miles behind the leaders and that the main pack are about forty miles behind. We intend to catch the former and lose the latter.
The nights out here are particularly long, being around 12 hours of darkness. This has meant four shifts each of one and a half hours and waking each other up is becoming increasingly hard! We are however determined to keep up the pace, despite the fact that we are starting to hallucinate. Hugo had a particularly interesting conversation last night with someone about golf!"
Current position of our teams:
Atlantic Whollf: 4 (16)
Rowing home: 7
Bluebellwood: 9
Image of the crew celebrating two weeks at sea today November 2 courtesy of Atlantic Atlantic Whollf.
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