| Weather was absolutely for hovering so i took the afternoon off from work and drove 30km (18.6miles) to hoverport. | |||||||||||
| We started by checking cracks on the ice, to see whether there is a way over for snow mobile. And by slowly following the crack we found area than can be used as a bridge to go over the crack. There wasn't any clouds on the sky, temperature around 0C (32F) and wind about 2m/s (4,5mph). Although it must have been a bit harder at the open bay. | |||||||||||
| We were three people onboard. After finding a way to other side of crack we headed to explore islands south of where i have operated so far. | |||||||||||
| Ice is getting much thicker now. All tough there unusual amount of crack going here and there it now carries the Explorer well and dragging a huge wave at certain speed doesn't break the ice anymore. There is about 80mm (3") ice where there is ice. Still open areas can be found; near narrow passages and big rocks. | |||||||||||
| We headed southeast for 9km (5,6miles) and turned to south to get to the south side of group of islands and started heading back. Now it really could see that there really isn't so little island that you couldn't put up a summer cottage on it. There really was lot of cabins in these islands. | |||||||||||
| As sun started to set down as if was so high even to start with. We were doing 20-25km/h (12-16mph) and came near to open sea. There was zone of new ice between solid ice and open sea; smooth as a glass and only 2cm (3/4") thick. I throttled more to get over hump speed because i knew we were going to drag a huge wave behind us if i were to go there at this speed. I got the speed up and we nicely glided over thin ice. We spotted a large sea eagle flying and i immediately started to solo down to get my camera and to shoot some pics of if. It didn't pay much attention to us when we were doing 35-40km/h (22-25mph) but as soon as speed started to slow and ice started to break it took off before i had my camera ready. It was getting dark to time to go home. We had a tail wind and we were doing ~60km/h (according to GPS maxspeed 91,5km/h, but this is a error they tend to make sometimes). | |||||||||||
| On our way we had great difficulties to turn in tight curves and indeed we actually got stuck ! We slid sideways to frozen vegetation and i had to drop the craft off cushion before it would hit the trees on the bank. When i tried to lift of and drive away we couldn't move. Rocking the craft helped little, but we were still stuck. One of passengers went "overboard" to assist us by dragging the craft from handrails in front. And we got off rather easily. We checked the place where we got stuck and it seems that when all those reed were swept cut to as a huge mat that caused air to escape from the skirt and causing us to get stuck. Well, you live and learn... Total of 20,5 kilometers was done today in a perfect weather. | |||||||||||
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