Position: We are almost two thirds of the way to French Polynesia. Our position is:
05 56.18S 116 00.47W
*Note: I am told you can copy and paste these coordinates into google earth and it will show you where we are.
Mileage: 1555nm- 1376nm = 179nm
Number of miles to go: 1376nm to go of approx. 3850nm. We are getting closer to French Polynesia.
Fish count: The count remains the same. 4 Mahi Mahi, 2 Cero and 6 tuna. One Marlin that we were happy got away! No fishing rods out still. It is much too rough out here to fish safely off the back of the boat, let alone try and clean the fish we catch. So fishing on hold until the waves calm down.
THE SAME AS YESTERDAY
We are still trying to sail, cook, live and sleep on an amusement ride. Not easy, but livable. We have definitely hit a current going with us now. This current is helping us along as we can see the miles churning by under the boat. We can live with the rougher seas if it means we do not have to spend as many days out in it. We still have a long way to go, but things are looking up, even if the humans are running low in fresh food.
WHERE DOES THE ELECTRICITY COME FROM?
We are running lots of electrical systems on the boat as we sail across to the South Pacific Islands. Some of the electrical systems we are running include auto-helm (steers the boat for us when we are not at the wheel), GPS and chart plotters, fridge, freezer, stereo (mood music), SSB radio, bulge pumps (we have a few leaks), water maker, and regularly charging up computers, tablet, head phones, e-readers and ipods.
So where does all this electricity come from? The simple answer is the boat battery bank. On Spirit of Argo we have 6 x 125 amp Lifeline AGM batteries. These batteries run all the electrical systems on the boat.
But won’t they run out of power? Good questions, and the answer is yes. We have to put energy back into the batteries as we use it up. On Spirit of Argo we use solar, wind and fossil fuels to generate electricity to top up our house bank of batteries. We have 760 W of solar panels. Press HOME and click ‘Quinn, his humans and the boat’ page of blog for aerial view looking down on boat. When the sun is out, these panels produce enough energy to run all our electrical systems.
What happens at night? Solar panels are the most efficient maintenance free way to generate electricity, but they do not work at night or on cloudy days. To make up for this Spirit of Argo is also fitted with 2 KISS wind turbines (wind generators). These wind generators are not as efficient as the solar panels, but keep the batteries topped up enough to get through the night and keep everything running.
What happens when you get cloudy days? The solar panels work, even on cloudy days, but do not produce as much energy. If you a have several cloudy days, and not very much wind, the batteries can get low and you will need another way to top them up. This is when we fall back on the use of fossil fuels. In our case we have fitted a larger, more efficient alternator to our main boat diesel engine. When we fire her up, and put her in gear, the batteries are very quickly topped up.
So now you know where all the electricity comes from. Including the electricity needed to send you this blog update by SSB radio.
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