The sun finally poked its nose out from behind the clouds this morning. Honestly, I feel as though I haven't seen it for weeks. Qingdao seemed to be perpetually shrouded in a dense layer of fog and in Leg Five, up until now, we have been sailing along in tough reaching conditions under slate grey skies. No surprises here, we are after all in the northern hemisphere in the wintertime. But now we are headed towards warmer conditions, and I for one plan to enjoy our sail down through the Pacific.
So far the trip has been a little unusual for me and probably for the other media crew members out here. Up above us there is some major rocket science going on. Inmarsat, who operate the satellite technology and provide the communications and data transfer services to the race are having a bit of a re-organization up in space. They recently launched a new satellite and this has allowed them to re-position some other satellites in their network which will result in a better overall service to users. However in the short term it causes a ten day outage for us here on our little Volvo 70's in terms of being able to get media off the boats. We do have a back up system (Fleet 33) onboard that allows us a more stripped down service that can be used for voice, text and smaller data files. Therefore, if you're reading this and checking out the images it's all working well. The more powerful (Fleet 500) system will come back online on February 24th and this will allow us to start sending the video and full resolution pictures that everyone has come to expect.
On previous legs of the race the most important part of my day onboard the boat has been centered on transmitting video, audio and picture selects of the day. This usually happens around midnight when I do the big transmit session. I can sit there sort of nodding off and make sure that everything goes through at this end before heading off to my bunk for a nice sleep knowing that all is taken care of- for that day anyway. So for now on this trip I'm concentrating on recording the trip as best I can and anticipating a major transmission on the 24th when everything comes back on line, fingers crossed. The most nervous must be the TV team back in the UK. Once our footage arrives on the 24th they have a 24hr window to turn the show around rather than the normal four days and subsequently they are relying on the MCM's quite heavily for storytelling and the editing.
So right now it is seven days and counting. Hopefully everything works when we switch back on. It will be sort of a dark side of the moon moment when we reappear. I'm looking forward to getting back to normal.
-Rick
