I started my day yesterday with a phone call with Jared from Nomadica Films, the production company from last year’s expedition. We talked about the differences between this expedition and last year’s and how I was in a different mindset. Last year I focused on my performance a lot and every day I pushed myself to put as many miles behind me as possible. This time around within the first few weeks I knew I had plenty of time to reach my goal of 300nm. The pressure is not the same but it still is a challenge to find the motivation to jump in the water and swim for hours day after day.
We had to make a choice between going 500nm west to intercept a tracker we set last year or going southeast to the calmest area of the gyre. Last year we found a big floating stir foam and a jerrycan of chemical next to each other. The stir foam was guarded by a curious Booby. The bird let us get very close to him and we clipped a tracker on its raft. It would be very interesting to find out if he is still perched on the piece of foam after traveling more than a 1000nm.
But in the interest of our mission, we are getting more by staying in the patch and we decided to move southeast to the calmest area.
During the day, Drew swam one hour with me while Ty paced us on the dinghy. The water was choppy and I decided to change course to avoid taking on the waves directly.
Today, the wind shifted and got stronger. Unfortunately, the winds were blowing from the south, which is exactly where we need to go.
I thought about the benefit of swimming today. In those types of conditions, I would only be able to progress northeast or northwest and in doing so we would lose one day of progression toward our south waypoint. I decided not to swim today and we all focused on boat and science tasks.
33º19 N / 146º53 W
Ben
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Photo credits @joshmunoz, @sea.marshall
