| For the last week it had been constantly around -20C (-4F) so for obvious reasons i didn't even think of going hovering last weekend. | |||
| Luckily i had spent that time doing overtime at work so i could sneak out on Friday as weather turned out to be good. | |||
| Explorer had stood in cold for two weeks and indeed it was difficult to get it running. I had to get another battery before we got it running. | |||
| After it started to run it run very well without problems. It was interesting to see what cold weather had done to ice situation and naturally there was more ice than before, but as much as i personally had expected. At least not in the area where we headed. Solid ice was only about 400m further than it was before. Severe winds last night had broken it to ice floes and we didn't want to go too far away from ice we could walk on (in case engine would decide not to run). | |||
| This time we headed to north. There is a narrow channel connecting bay and passage to inland i wanted to explore it. In some maps it's shown wide enough to operate, but in recent map it's not shown at all. We got there in no time assisted by light tail wind. It's interesting that you can find magnificent scenery just around the corner of where you've lived all your life. Water was still running free in the channel and on the both sides of it there was 20m vertical wall. It wasn't that long, but it was narrow and we didn't try to go through as it was getting late and we didn't want to risk facing a dead end after bends we could see. | |||
| We got back and now it was trickier to take the turn from river hoverport as water was 34cm (1ft) below normal level and there was some uphill to do without momentum force from speed. I let my passengers to jump off and did the transition by myself. There wasn't any problems getting ashore, but a hole begins to form where Explorer has been cleaned out of snow many times and this hole seems to capture the craft any time i just get close enough of it. | |||
| We did 22,2km (13,8miles) in a sunny weather at average speed of 21,1km/h (13mph). | |||