Allen Moore is fast

Day 3 of the Yukon Quest, and Allen Moore is consistently running the fastest times between checkpoints.  He has, in fact, been the fastest into each checkpoint so far (spreadsheet here).  You can also see it in the race flow chart if you look carefully.  So how's Hugh keeping up?  Well, for one thing he's spending far less time in checkpoints.  He only stopped briefly in Braeburn and took his mandatory 4 in Carmacks, while Allen took his mandatory 4 in Braeburn but also spent nearly 5 hours in Carmacks.  Hugh spent only 21 minutes in Pelly and Allen appears to have spent about 7 hours there (the website leaderboard isn't updated, but we can see his movement on the tracker).

So the obvious question is: is Hugh spending a lot of time resting on the trail?  It would account for his slower runtimes between checkpoints.  Unfortunately he's having a lot of tracker outages so it's hard to say for sure.  While when his tracker's working it shows him moving consistently, there are enough outages to think we're not seeing some stops.  On the other hand his longest outage is only three hours, so even if he's camping during the outages he's not camping much.

Speaking of trackers, I just learned yesterday that Trackleaders names their devices.  For example, Rob Cooke's tracker is named "Olive," and apparently she's a good, reliable performer (and we've seen relatively little outage from his tracker).  Trackleaders has a good working relationship with the SPOT manufacturers and were able to get more reliable, upgraded GPS chips installed in the existing SPOT 2 chassis, but there still have been a lot of outages so far during this race.  Trackleaders and the race management are working hard to figure out what's causing them.  There are several ideas about it but so far the best guess seems to be the metal mounting plates that were attached to sleds at the vet checks.