March Challenger Challenge!

[ell]

Here's the first check in post for March and a little about this month's challenge. If you haven't signed up yet, but still want to run with us, feel free to either sign up here with a goal for the month or if that makes you uncomfortable, just check in with the mileage that you ran each week and I will add you to the crew as supernumeraries.

The Crew:
meri_oddities 110 miles or 177 km
ridicully 93 miles or 150 km
silveraspen 50 miles or 81 km
franzi 9 miles or 15 km
temve 140 miles or 226 km
thalia 65 miles or 105 km
semielliptical 55 miles or 89 km
linaelyn 75 miles or 121 km
blnchflr 44 miles or 71 km
ilanarama 200 miles or 323 km
ell 160 miles or 258 km

Total Challenge distance this month: 1001 miles = 1615 km (872 nautical miles)

So, since I was never going to come up with something quite as cool and timely as the Ididarod Challenge in February, I thought I'd combine the distance challenge (winner of the poll) with the boat challenge (only one vote short of a tie).

We're going on the HMS Challenger challenge this month! Since the original Challenger expedition (which was, incidentally, the first major oceanographic expedition) lasted from 1872 to 1876 and covered a whopping 68,000 nautical miles, we're going to only be running over a small part of it. We'll start in Bermuda (32.3333° N, 64.7500° W) and head up to Halifax (44.6700° N, 63.6100° W), a straight line distance of 740 Nautical Miles (or 1371 km or 850 regular miles). We already know that we can't sail directly there because we've got soundings to make and samples to take and we're going to head a bit west in order to find the Gulf Stream, but with following winds and some help from the Gulf Stream, we should make Halifax by the end of the month. We'll be going a bit slower than the ship, but not much.

I picked Bermuda to Halifax which the HMS Challenger visited in April and May of 1873 because I knew the distance was kind of close and because I wanted to see their Gulf Stream measurements.

Here's our route:


And especially for everyone who is snowbound yet again, here's where we're leaving from:



The Challenger Expedition was fascinating and generated thousands of pages of charts, reports, and graphs and collected thousands of samples and specimens of entirely new species. It was an incredible scientific undertaking. You can find copies of some of the reports online in digital format, for example here.

And I've just put this book about the Challenger Expedition on my Kindle - I'll give you a review of it by the end of the month for anyone who gets interested.

Also, it's temve's birthday today! Happy Birthday!

Comments

[linaelyn]

How much to I love this? SO MUCH. Maybe not as timely, but definitely every bit as cool at The Iditarod Challenge, sez I. Trust you to work oceanography into it, somehow. (Also, I may have LOLed a little at this being The Challenger Challenge. Oh, you.)

We've had a really sunny and mild winter here in California, and I'm still craving that beach in Bermuda. I can taste the Atlantic now.

My mileage thus far is 13.85 miles. The breaks in the rain have kindly favored my schedule for the past few days.

[ell]

:-) I was thinking of you when I engineered this plan...

(We should all totally have a DW runners meet-up somewhere like that picture shows...)