2/21/13 – Jordan Hanssen
Hello, this is Jordan Hanssen, of the rowboat, ‘James Robert Hanssen’ calling, on 2/21/13. We are at 17°11.538N, 35°37.336W. We’re going at about 2.9 knots at a heading of about 278 at this moment, but it’s changing back and forth. So today was a work day, outside of actual rowing … let’s see, what do we got…? Well, we got our marching orders from Dr. Stahr and Dan Heyl to fix the Airmar which gives a GPS location to the science equipment as well as a bunch of other data, and then to fix the wind generator. It was also a good opportunity to scrape the bottom of the boat. So we took our two 90-minute shifts and put those together and Markus and I about an hour to scrape the bottom of the boat – we hadn’t scraped it in two weeks. And there was probably about 10 pounds of gooseneck muscles growing, and some of them up to an inch and a half long. I’m just blown away with how persistent the life is out here. Adam did his best fixing the Airmar stuff, and we’re just awaiting confirmation to see if that worked. Then we went to the wind generator, Pat did some things, sparks flew, Adam did some things and sparks flew. And all of a sudden we didn’t have power. So there we were sitting in the middle of the ocean with absolutely no power except for a little bit of battery in our satellite phone. We called up our electrician extraordinaire, Dan Heyl, and thankfully he was up! So we talked out the problem with him and we were able to change some fuses and get the ocean rowboat back to full power again. The best part about it is that although the wind generator isn’t completely fixed, we actually have been charging the entire time with all of our solar panels. So we have full power and we’ll be able to keep rolling with, uh, well, pretty much everything we planned on doing. <garbled> …. <call lost>