White Satin - Fruit, Veg and Electricity

Tuesday 22 November
264 miles sailed, 2502 to go

Our course has initially swooped down from Las Palmas South towards the Cape
Verde islands, but will soon start to have a touch of right hand down a bit.
Think of the course as a banana that you are holding at the stalk by your
fingertips, with the bottom bending off to the left - well, we are nearly at
the end of the stalk. Just the main banana to go.

On the subject of fruit, we are slowly eating through the fresh fruit & veg.
mountain procured by Vicki and Helen. The 6 enormous cabbages will I think
turn out to be about 5 and a half too many, while the mandatory pre-dinner
cucumbers will put us all off these pointless veg for life. This situation
was cause by the order for 2 cucumbers for the trip being misread by the
greengrocer as 2kg so we in fact had 2.4kg which is more cucumbers than you
can shake a stick (or if you have no stick, a cucumber) at.

Our distance travelled over the last day has been less than we hoped due to
being in 'the Doldrums' for about 6 rather boring hours late yesterday.
David finally gave in and we used the boat engine to motor. We will have to
declare our engine hours to the rally committee and these will be added as a
penalty to our passage time for determining our position in the (race I
mean) rally. We are agreed this is not about racing - unless we do well in
our class of course, in which case it is definitely a race.

Our power situation causes some discussion. Our overall consumption of
electricity averages about 10 amps over the space of 24 hours. That is
including lights, the fridge, PCs, phones, the navigation systems and the
automatic steering(but excluding running the water maker which will be
covered in a later blog instalment if they let me at the keyboard again).
Our power requirements are in theory met as follows:
- Towed generator, about 6.5 amps (24 hours continuous)
- Solar panels, about 2 amps averaged across 24 hours
- Engine alternator, run for about an hour a day producing say 50 amps, i.e.
2 amps averaged over 24 hours.
We seem to have a shortfall requiring longer running of the engine. Hold on
to your seats for another thrilling blog episode on this subject!

Calculating times
Paul