Day 33 – So close yet so far
It’s been getting busy out on the Atlantic and Oceans Elite have reported that the tanker they saw today was the third ship they’ve seen in the last three days. Those of you who have tuned into the yb races app and the tracking screen on this website will of course have spotted just how close the crews have been to each other over the last couple of days. So far the closest they have been is about 10nm from each other. This is close in ocean terms but is still more than 15km apart and will take a crew at least 5 hours in reasonable conditions (while the other crew doesn’t move at all (which is impossible) to claw back. The crews are chatting to each other and trying to engineer a meeting but without forcing one crew to stop rowing, this is proving a tad tricky. We can just imagine how fun this opportunity must be for the crews. Fingers crossed they can make it happen.
The other news we’ve had from Rowing Stones is that they are having problems charging their satellite phone. We can still communicate with them via their inreach device but it does make things a bit slower and more difficult. We’re hopeful that the work around solutions we have suggested to them will work and that they’ll be able to repair it and get it working again but otherwise it may be a bit quiet in terms of hearing their voices for the 2nd half of the journey. This is less than ideal but we have the inreach device as a backup communication tool and the yb tracker and AIS let us know where the crew are. In an emergency they still have all their emergency beacons which can be activated to alert us to the situation. So while it is clearly not ideal, there is no need to panic.
