Day 10 – Battery charging and solar
The ocean rowing boats used by Mission Atlantic are feats of modern engineering. The main structural elements of the boat are rather simple as are the electrical systems onboard. At it’s heart each boat is a place where the rowers can sit and heave on the oars as effectively as possible. However, beneath the surface where it all appears rather simple, behind the switchboard and electrical panels there is quite a lot of fairly high tech electronics at work.
The whole system is powered by the sun. Solar panels mounted onto the cabins charge the batteries. The batteries then power everything on the boat. During a sunny day there is plenty of power available as the solar panels should provide sufficient energy to run almost every system onboard. However, during overcast days, such as the teams have encountered for most of their time as sea so far, or at night, the boat systems will be using more than the panels provide.
This means that the teams have to keep half an eye on the amount of power left in the batteries every time they turn something on. They have to be twice as careful if it’s overcast as although it may feel bright, the amount of power the panels can bring into the system may not be nothing, but it is significantly reduced. It seems that Ocean’s Elite may not have been watching their battery monitor quite as carefully as they should have been as they called us when everything turned itself off because the batteries have gone flat!
The good news is that the team have everything they need to be able to continue their journey even if their entire electrical system fails. However, of course this wouldn’t be ideal for a number of obvious reasons including the ease of making water using the electrical desalination device, having a nice big GPS screen to look at boat positions and the ease of charging up any battery powered item including the satellite phone. But, all these things are not essential to the crew’s success and they are more than capable of getting to Barbados without any of these expensive toys. Of course having said all of that we really want to help them bring their electrical system back to life. Today has been fairly sunny on the Atlantic and the team have been focussing on the job of charging up one battery. They system they have normally uses and charges two batteries to use as a massive battery bank (which is one reason why they’ve been able to last so long without it being a problem) but to get things back up on a level keel we need to focus on getting things working again which means baby steps and one battery receiving and giving the power, at least for the moment.
The good news is that the dramatic discharge hadn’t completely fried the battery and after a few hours it was showing signs of becoming reanimated with the voltage slowly increasing as the power of the sun was focussed into it’s cells. The team will carefully monitor things overnight but the good news is that it looks like the system will be able to be reanimated and get back to operational status in short order.
The further good news is that Under Twok have been donated a Jackery power station (and dedicated solar panel) to the crew, initially with the aim of using it as the sole power source for the Starlink satellite communications. However, after today’s issue the Jackery remains as our final pit stop manoeuvre and could potentially be rewired into the electrical systems onboard to power the boat for the rest of the journey. Yes it would look a little bit like that scene from Apollo 13 when the engineering team have to make a square carbon dioxide scrubber out of a round unit and all the random parts lying around, but it would work. Electricity is the same no matter where it comes from after all. Hopefully though it won’t come to this.
For Rowing Stones there is a bit less to report. They have clearly got through the first part of the row as now they are starting to look at how fast they have gone so far and then looked at how far away Barbados is and doing some calculations, and started to worry. In reality, they don’t need to panic just yet. Ocean Rowing boats always start slow and then speed up as the crew become accustomed to rowing on the ocean and the food gets eaten so everything becomes a lot lighter and faster. Also the weather starts to organise itself a bit more, so average speeds inevitably increase. Of course we’d always prefer that crews cross in a shorter period of time as it reduces the time they are exposed to the risky environment of being in a small boat on the ocean, but we’re not worried…yet.
For the next few days both crews will enjoy strong following conditions which will likely leave them a bit damp but which will also leave them hundreds of miles closer to Barbados by the time Christmas arrives. That will be a real Christmas gift which we can all raise a glass to.
