Rather than virtual hitchhiking on multiple vehicles-- take ONE trip on ONE ship (or plane)

This morning, it struck me that my approach to circumnavigating Antarctica has a flaw, so far-- but it's easily corrected. I look at this map of the 1983 partial-circumnavigation of Antarctica by a US Coast Guard ship doing an inspection tour. It's one of the most complete partial circumnavigations of all the inspection tours I've seen to date.

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Note the label in the bottom left hand corner-- CRUISE TRACK OF THE USCG CUTTER POLAR STAR. I didn't pay attention to that earlier. I was merely interested in ANY circumnavigation path. Now however it seems to me that paying attention to WHICH SHIP and what vehicles are used in these Inpection tours is critical to my mission of determining the actual distance and time around Antarcitca to prove it an ice rim or an island-- 60,000 miles or 15,000 miles. I looked up the USCG Polar Star and it has it's own web page and news. We see that it ended its involvement in "Deep Freeze" in 2014 and there have been no updates since then. The ship was rebuilt since 1983 of course-- and it's still in service. I wish my car could be like that. 

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REFERENCES

uscg cutter polar star antarctica - Google Search

USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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QUESTIONS

• Will Polar Star go on another inspection tour? 
• When? 
• Will is do a complete circumnavigation?
• If not, will another ship? 
• Does CG really have to be part of DHS? 

NOTEWORTHY POINTS

• Inspection tours under ATS are the most hopeful way I have to do my task here. I don't think Vendee Globe is real and the latitude is too high anyway. The inspection tours ARE real. 
• I need to track inspection tours using a single vehicle-- whether that's a plane or ship. Multiple vehicles and multiple teams create too many tracking complications. We need to follow ONE team, in ONE vehicle-- tracking time and distance-- and we need to see a complete circumnavigation tour-- which has never been done-- but was almost done a few times. 
• The only other way to do this I can see at the moment is to hire a millionnaire who will finance a private ship or plane to do the circumnavigation, hopping from ice runway to ice runway and station to station as, say, a journalist or private inspection tour operator. That's far less likely than tracking existing inspection tours coming up however. 

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[THREADED FORUM & notes ]