One other (should have been obvious) thing: unless the cell phones are restricted to dumb phones, sailors won't need to talk to anyone ashore to see the tracking data, they can just use the phone to access the website.
Everyone's got a phone, everyone can get to the data, where's the crime?
Mike
Assuming you can get a signal.
We actually toyed with this idea during the Everglades challenge and had the gear to view the tracking map. However, it was pretty useless when the event tracking map crashed. But, then again, knowing where our competition was really wouldn't have changed anything - we're all going in the same direction to the same points and it would have mostly just been trivia. Its not like we would have changed course based on any of the information we could learn. With the length of the Everglades challenge, it could possibly affect when and how long we shut down for rest and knowing the weather forecast after two days is a benefit to your course selection. However, that's not a factor in a race like the Florida 300 where you get to reboot every evening. I still think having access to any of that information in a race like this is more of a distraction and offers no real benefit. What are you going to do? Go faster?
