1,000 Miles from Nowhere...

Have you ever been 1,000 miles from nowhere? Well, that is where we are. There actually are not many places on Earth where you can be more than 1,000 miles from any land. The middle of the Pacific is one of these places. Yes, it is a little intimidating when I stop and think about it.

There is literally nothing out here but a LOT of water. There are no other boats for hundreds of miles, and virtually no life that we can see other than the dead squid that land on our decks, the flying fish and the occasional albatross. Albatross are amazing birds to watch by the way. They fly over the ocean with such ease, thousands of miles from land.

The only thing keeping us alive out here is 47 feet of fiberglass. The boat is actually a mini city. We generate our own power by using solar panels and supplement with our engine on cloudy days (which has been pretty much every day). We store the energy we produce in our battery system, which is 12v DC and gets converted to 120v AC through an inverter, so we have power just like you do at home.

Power is just about everything to us out here. How much we use, and how much is left in our batteries is something we watch closely in our battery management system. With this system I can see how much is coming in from our solar or our engine, and how much is going out. And it has a gauge like a fuel tank to let me know what is left in the batteries.

We use power for just about everything on board. Our refrigeration is running off it, which keeps our frozen meals frozen, and our fresh food fresh. Refrigeration is by far the largest consumer of power on the boat. We do have a mechanical refrigeration system that runs off the engine, so we turn that on whenever the engine is on. This helps save power when the engine is off.

We also need power to make water. We store about 100 gallons of water, but that is not enough for 5 people to live on for nearly 3 weeks. So, we have a reverse osmosis system which takes sea water and makes it into fresh clean drinking water. It truly is magic. But it takes a LOT of power to run this system. It’s our second largest consumer of power. So, every time we use water, we are basically draining our batteries. Its something I must continually remind the crew of. We do a lot to conserve fresh water. For example we have a salt water spigot in the galley we use for washing dishes and then just rinse with fresh (its CRASY how much water you use when washing dishes…)

Our MVP crew member, Otto, the autopilot, also takes power. The autopilot faithfully steers us where we want to go. It never whines or complains but sometimes it will just give up if there is too much wind. Then we hand steer. Its only happened once so far. Otto can steer a specific magnetic heading or hold a wind angle to keep our sails full. We normally keep it in wind angle mode so the boat sails well even as the wind shifts around. We make small adjustments to this to keep us on our course. All the crew know when on watch what our heading should be and our preferred wind angle.

So where does Otto get our wind angle and heading information? From our instrument system. Which is always on and takes power! Our instruments measure the speed of the boat through the water, the speed of the wind, the angle of the wind to the boat, the magnetic heading of the boat, our GPS position, the depth of the water, the temperature of the water, the barometric pressure, and more. We have a system that logs all this data and transmits it to a web page, which is what you see when you look at our current location. AIS is another important system we have, which uses our radio to broadcast our boat location and information to other boats in the area. It also lets us see details about the boats around us (if there are any). We are alerted by this system if we are on a potential collision course with another boat. A nice feature!

We are connected to the internet using Starlink, which AMAZNNG technology, full speed internet in the middle of nowhere. But it is a power HOG, so we only use it when necessary, 3 or 4 times a day so that we can send position updates, these blog updates, and text/call with family. Its only for 15 minutes or so at a time. I’m glad it’s not always on, because part of getting out here is getting away from the constant flow of internet information. But it is REALLY nice to have when you need it.

We cook with propane, so that at least does not use our batteries.

There are plenty of other systems on the boat such as bilge pumps, emergency beacon systems, plumbing, toilets, sails, rigging, lines, life raft, etc. And I must be familiar with all of it. Our lives depend on it….