[Great news! Clouds have cleared an given the crew enough solar energy to get a few new blogs out. No new pictures yet, so we’ll supplement from Erinn Hale’s pictures from Dakar. Here’s one about power rationing and oar breakage. -Greg]
(photo: Canadian Wildlife Federation / Erinn J Hale)
Conservation. What does that word mean? A lot of things to a lot of people. For us it means what’s on this boat is all that is on this boat. Power/Energy. We don’t have enough to do everything we want all the time. We get most of our power from the sun and had been planning on augmenting that with power from the wind generator. This would be a huge boost for our science and navigation equipment needs, both of which must be run 24/7. No matter what, we knew power would be slim but we are having particular trouble with our wind generator, adding another great challenge to this already arduous journey. Any troubleshooting fix we try has to wait until waves are calm enough to stand out the rear hatch, and the wind strong enough to turn the windmill generator to see if what we did actually worked. As you may imagine it takes a while for these ideal conditions to occur.
Back to the topic at hand… Every day, excluding rowing we must make a choice of what we are going to do, what we are going to charge (computer, batteries for video, iPod), and what power-hogging systems we are going to run: water maker, science equipment, email communications, sending pictures or video, etc. Every time you see an image or a video, that equates to a significant power cost to us. Naturally, water is the priority. Science instruments are our 2nd priority, but we also want to make sure that you can follow this journey along with us. Since you are reading this blog, that means we have not sent any science data back in about a week, and communications and blog content has risen to the top of the list. That being said, this means we are only making half of our water for today, but not to worry we have saved some from yesterday.
Part of why we were able to send so much content earlier in the trip was that we had several sunny days with few, if any, clouds. For the last week, however, its been mostly or partly cloudy and we have really had to be aware how much power is coming in or going out.
This makes me think constantly about what I need and what I want.
Oars – We have broken two of six, and it takes four to row the boat. What can we do to conserve them? We are now more likely to go on sea anchor in weather we would have otherwise rowed in, and that means we will be slower. We also spread the oarlocks wider to allow the oar to pop up & out if it gets caught by a wave, thereby limiting possibility for breakage. Hopefully it will be enough.
Conservation is taking care of the things you have now, so you will have enough later. It’s not always the fun thing to do. A lot of times it’s not what you want to hear but we live in a finite world where we do have to conserve. That’s a reality. Being in a tiny rowboat just brings this point home with a little more immediacy.