So this morning started out like all the others so far on this passage. Me dragging my exhausted self out of bed after I have overslept my sleeping shift. I do my daily round of the boat recommitting a number of flying fish and squid back to the sea. And yes, I am keeping a tally, inspired by my mom who likes to track and organize everything. It does seem an amazing feat the height these little guys can get to end up losing their lives on the deck of Maple. Not exactly the close animal encounter I am looking for as I pry their bodies off which have already partially glued themselves to the deck. Anyway, I digress. Next important task for the morning is making coffee, followed by my lying down in the cockpit...yes, I did just wake up and it should be D who is now resting, but what can I say, I have a very tolerant captain.
There are many things that go beep on the boat. The most common one is the auto pilot warning us that the wind has shifted...again...boy is the wind fickle out here. Another interesting beep is when our aging chart plotter GPS decides to intermittently stop working so it loses our position. That same GPS also beeps incessantly due to interference from the SSB radio when we try to connect the radio. However, the beep this morning that caused the adrenaline to start pumping so it negated the need for the coffee, was the alarm that the house battery bank had just shut down. Yes, the batteries, which keep all things running on board...all the navigation instruments, the fridge/freezer, charges our various electronics, allows me to froth my milk in the morning with a hand blender so I can pretend I am having a latte, you know all the critical things we need electricity for.
About a year ago, we dropped a bunch of dollars on replacing our dying AGM batteries with lithium. You have no idea the hemming and hawing we went through to decide to spend that much more money on lithium and then where to source them. We picked them up when in Florida and installed them just before we left for Cuba a year ago. We have not one regret over the choice to buy lithium, they are amazing. The ability they have to charge quickly with our solar panels. The fact that we can use more than 80% of their capacity. Ok, that pretty much taps out my knowledge of batteries. Anyway, we love them. What is not great is the monitoring system that came with the batteries. It is crap. And without going into detail that I can't actually explain because I don't understand it, basically the monitoring system thought the batteries were dead, when in fact they were doing just fine. So the system shut down the whole battery bank leaving us with no power.
D immediately understood what was going on thankfully as my foggy brain was still going through the inventory of beeps it could be. While he is trying to override the system to restart, I fortunately go to the helm to discover that hey, without power the auto pilot is no longer steering. Minor detail. As the boat was heading into irons (which I think is the term for when the boat is pointing straight into the wind and the sails are not doing anything), I managed to hand steer with all the instruments staring blankly back at me. Look at me, I can be useful sometimes.
We managed to turn the battery bank back on and are charging away, so hopefully that is the end of our excitement for today. Being hundreds of miles from anything and briefly without power reminds us how self sufficient we need to be out here. I am not even going to try to explain how we are attempting to fool the system into realizing that we do in fact have well charged batteries because I don't get it. But thankfully in addition to being very tolerant, I have a very smart and resourceful captain on board.
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At 2019-05-04 23:00 (utc) our position was 04°38.06'S 100°47.47'W
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