From the Blog of String Theory

by John Mortimer, July 13th, 2014

Since you're all probably watching our progress on Yellow Brick Road, you know that we chose to take our chances and take the path between two high pressure systems. In fact most of the fleet appears to have chosen 

to do the same thing with various degrees of success. What's not so obvious 
from watching our path on Yellowbrick, though, is why we're one of the more 
northerly of the boats taking this path. It really comes down to Hal's 
recommendations, which, as mentioned previously, are updated at least twice 
a day using our actual boat position, the latest weather information, and 
Gunnar's experience and intuition.

As this blog entry is written, we're now about halfway through our traverse between the heart of the two high pressure systems, and as predicted, the wind conditions to get here (i.e. skirting the northern edge of the southerly high) were very light. As you've no doubt seen on Yellowbrick, our progress was very slow and it was an extremely painful ~24 hours on String Theory. Mike had been practicing his noose knots and slyly looking towards the top of the mast. If our attempt fails we're not sure that Hal will make it out alive...We know from the most recent 17:00 roll call results that we've lost ground to almost all of our competitors. However, Hal is still predicting that if we continue to believe in his predictions and we continueto sail the most optimized path we can, given the latest weather forecasts, stronger winds are in our future when we start to pass through the two systems.

Gunnar hopes that because of our choice to follow a path that took us closer to the no-go zone between the two highs as compared to the rest of the fleet, we'll see the stronger winds a bit before the rest of the fleet to the south of us and thus the (relatively) short term pain we've just experienced in the stretch of light winds will pay off in the long run. Because we only receive updates twice per day about the location of the other race boats, by watching the progress of the boats on Yellowbrick you'll probably know before we do if our gamble has paid off.

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