Another delay
Published on 17.03.2011 - North 3
Briton Ben Saunders should have been heading north by now. But he is still waiting in Resolute Bay for a good weather window.
Two days ago at 7am and once more at 5.30pm, B. Saunders spoke to Troy, the pilot that will be dropping him off at Cape Discovery (the start point) while the pilot was asking information about the weather forecast to the Arctic weather team at Edmonton. The latest is that there is a big area of low pressure over north-east Greenland, and overrunning cloud, high winds and blizzard conditions at the northern end of Ellesmere Island (where he’ll be setting off from). Flying that day was of course out of the question.
Since then no news from Ben. But the good news was that the forecasters thought the bad weather should lift by the end of Wednesday, and there’s also space in the flying schedule for Ben. It looks like the explorer will be dropped at around midday local time on Thurs 17th (about 5pm in the UK).
This delay does not seem to affect too much as long as he is off before the full moon on the 19th, "when there’s scope for high and low tides", writes Ben, "to make the sea ice at the coast more difficult to negotiate..."
