Looking back at Saturday I remember little about my midnight to 3am shift. Maybe it’s because I’m struggling to consciousness shortly after waking at midnight. I’ve decided I don’t really like this shift rotation, or at least my position on it, as I rarely get more than 3 hours sleep at a stretch, even though I get 6 hour segments off. The timing just doesn’t work. I can’t get to sleep at 7pm so I have to wait to nearer 9pm to sleep. Once I go to sleep at 3am I’m usually awake again by 6am as dawn wakes me as I know there are things to do at that time. I want to stick this out to the Galapagos and try and make it work but if I can’t we’ll need to revise the schedule somehow for the longer trip.<\/p>\n

When I woke at 6am of the morning of day 2 it was to cloudy skies, winds, rain and squalls. We were in the middle of a patch of squalls clearly seen around us and on the radar. We’d been motor sailing all night as until then the wind had been negligible but at least for a while we had some wind. Helen even spotted a water spout – a mini tornado – just a few miles away. I didn’t think we had the coriolis force down here to whip these up but we do it seems. I shifted course to try and avoid the squalls but while two beared down on us either side another formed right on top of us from nowhere it seemed. I turned the boat and ran the gap between the original two squalls and we were out of the line and into dead air again.<\/p>\n

At 8am we tuned into the Pan Pacific Net to report our position. It was great to hear Jackster on the net who had just left Panama City bound for the Galapagos. We will certainly be there together probably arriving within a day or two of each other.<\/p>\n

That was it for the wind. For most of the rest of the day we saw nothing more than 2 knots of wind, often less or zero. The ocean at times was reduced to an undulating mirror with the occasional knot or two of wind creating small ripples. We saw many turtles swimming by doing their own thing and the occasional coconut. Sometimes it was hard to tell the two. We were joined from time to time by two birds. One a sea bird who eventually settled down on our port spreader. The other appeared to be some land bird, perhaps lost at sea. It eventually settled down on our port job sheet looking quite exhausted and seemingly too tired to move when we came near. Helen put out some bread and water in case it wanted to avail itself but I never saw it approach them. We also saw a few dolphins in the distance which didn’t come to the boat.<\/p>\n

We kept to our 4 knot strategy all day making it almost 24 hours of continuous motor sailing in this fashion. Around 6pm I noticed the charging cycle working a little differently than normal. Normally the 72V banks accept maximum amps charging – somewhere around 130A – until the voltage on the banks reaches around 86V. At that time the amps going into the banks starts to reduce. We usually cut charging around 60A. This time the amps started reducing before we reached 75V. I don’t like changes until I understand them. It dawned on me we’d been running high currents in and out of the batteries for a whole day now and as they had non-zero resistance, perhaps we were building up heat. I accessed one banks and found them very hot. In fact, the water inside the cells was close to boiling. Not good at all. We therefore stopped dead in the water for dinner. John and I watched a movie while Helen rested during which time 7 knots of wind appeared from nowhere. Still with the rear hatches open for ventilation we raised the sails to at least make some progress. We’d been drifting at half a knot to the ENE so 3 knots to the SW was much better progress.<\/p>\n

Once the movie was finished we closed up the lockers putting all the supplies we’d had there back in place. It was now Helen’s 9pm shift so I woke her and took my needed three hours sleep.<\/p>\n

Now we are back motoring. The wind had died to next to nothing during Helen’s shift. She’d left the boat to drift knowing the batteries were hot and I needed my rest. Now that we’re motoring again we’re abandoning the 4 knot approach as it’s not sustainable over the long term. We have sufficient fuel for 5 days of motoring non-stop. By cruising at 6 knots I’m allowing about 30A at most to flow into the batteries. This should limit any further cooking as most of the current is flowing directly through to the motors. My going a little faster we’ll make better progress against the current and, hopefully, reach wind sooner.<\/p>\n

Looking back on the day the big surprise was hitting what felt like the doldrums so early in our trip. The mornings forecast had the ITCZ as high as 8N angling down just to the south of us. This means it could shift south over the next few days matching our course. That would be a real drag. I don’t want to motor non-stop for too long so I’ll need to plan rest stops if this continues to be the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking back at Saturday I remember little about my midnight to 3am shift. Maybe it’s because I’m struggling to consciousness shortly after waking at midnight. I’ve decided I don’t really like this shift rotation, or at least my position on it, as I rarely get more than 3 hours sleep at a stretch, even though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-sea","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2732,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2674\/revisions\/2732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}