Boo Tiger Log 08/12/06
Boo Tiger
Ruth Elliott-Smith
Fri 8 Dec 2006 22:08
Less than 600 miles to go and we're all v excited. Batteries ran right down
yesterday. Power and energy management for such a long time at sea is a big
thing. None of us really bothered much with volts and amperes before but
we're pretty damn expert now. We consume about 200 amps per day (at
least) and the generator replenishes them at the rate of 50 per hour so
we must run generator for at least 4 hours a day. Sometimes when we overload
it, it trips out and yesterday we didn't notice it had done this. Result, 7pm,
all electrical systems went down - navigation, communications, lights,
cooking, water-making. We were just a dark little powerless tub bobbing on
the main, not even a nav light to warn big ships were were there.
Fortunately we're out of the shipping lanes and havn't seen many big ships
since a couple of days out of Las Palmas. Even the generator battery was too
flat to start the generator. However fortunately you can power up the
batteries from the engine and we always take the precaution of switching the
engine battery off when not motoring just in case of occurrances like this.
We got the motor started and powered up the jenny battery then ran it for
hours and hours to power up everything else. Just about back to normal now.