Hello Team!

My Helium arrived!  It is shiny and industrial and beautiful!  (Photos coming soon.)

The gas balloon arrived!  It’s all wrapped up, with airport stickers, and looks a little like the crates at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie. Cool.  (Photos coming soon.)

The rockstar gas pilot has arrived!  I have some stories, but none of my stories involve landing amidst a drug running cartel in Mexico, or in a small village in Czech Republic, or in Morocco after crossing the ocean.  HE has stories.

The wind has also arrived!  20 knots.  This is bad.  If we launched at 1:00am as we hoped, we’d be blown out to sea before dawn.  We’d be halfway to Bermuda and, as my friend Dave Nigro commented, *half way* to Bermuda is just no good.  All the way, that would be good.  I could go to the corporate offices of the firm I work for, headquartered there.  (That would be a story, though admittedly only among a certain subset of people, namely those at my company.)  File attached, showing trajectories if we took off at 1:00am and flew at 200, 500, or 1,000 meters.  (We can’t really fly at 200 meters-- we’d hit stuff.)

So, right now, we await the new weather release at 8pm. Troy has an excellent meteorologist that he works with, and we’re going to talk up our options at 9pm EST to try to find a window that 1) lets us fly and 2) lets us live also.  

Wish us luck!

Jonathan