Day 8 – Rough stuff

Although wind and waves aren’t great it’s the cloud which can be an ocean rower’s worst enemy. Without sun falling onto the solar panels the crews have to start being a little cautious about how they manage the power which is available onboard. They do have two sizable batteries onboard to allow the boat to continue to operate without too many issues for long period of cloud and the panels will still throw some charge into the batteries even if there is 100% cloud cover the state of their charge will slowly decline over the cloudy period.

This just means that crews normally have to be a little be cautious and conservative when choosing when to make water using their onboard desalination device (or watermaker) as it consumes the most power. Other elements such as GPS and AIS do remain on all the time (and navigation lights at night) but their power drain is rather low. In addition to this Ocean’s Elite have their Starlink communications which uses about as much power as the watermaker when it’s turned on and it is all too easy to leave it running for a while for the system to boot up, initialise, find the satellites, get connected and then connect to the phone onboard. That’s before any content can be shared at all. In cloudy conditions this can mean that it’s time to put the Starlink down for a few days and focus on rowing. We’re sure that Ocean’s Elite will be back up, connecting and chatting to us all via Starlink soon. In the meantime, we’ll have to rely on text messages via their InReach device.

Onboard Rowing Stones morale is high, and turns out drum and bass and rowing through the squalls are two things that mix very well. The crew reported that they were definitely feeling around 30 knots of wind but that they’re having a TON of fun. 2m waves to surf, and a proper stormy wind. Then the wind turned and caused them to deploy the parachute anchor to avoid being pushed too far north. No sooner had they done so than the wind dropped completely for four hours, leaving them a bit confused and wondering what to do next. The weather forecast we provide is focussed on 24 hour increments and within that there is the chance the wind could drop right off and then intensify again before the start of the next reporting period. Also there are a number of squalls around at the moment which are too small to be accurately reported (other than to tell the crews that there are some in the area) and within these squalls the wind picks up and the sea gets rough, but then as soon as this weather cell passes, the strong winds drop.