Tuesday 11th December 2007

Fish, Eye Spy and Fuel Cells

It's a beautiful sunny day here again today and with only 550 miles to go we're making the most of the calmer conditions to catch up on some reading and top up our tans. The winds are still good and we are making sound progress so we are looking at arriving in St Lucia either Friday night or Saturday morning. This is about 5 days ahead of schedule.

Over the last couple of weeks the fuel cell system has been running on demand in the background, quietly satisfying our power requirements. Unfortunately, the system has now detected a fault and shut itself down in a controlled fashion. There are a number of controls built into the system that will shut it down safely if it detects any problem with its operation. The immediate reason for the shutdown was not obvious. However, once we and the engineers at HQ have had a chance to fully analyse the fault codes and system data then we will have a fuller understanding of what actually happened. Although the problem is almost certainly minor and given that we are nearly there, we have decided that on the advice of mission control in Basingstoke not to re-start the system.

Whilst we the crew are a little sad at losing the system for the remainder of the trip and will have to be a little careful about extravagant use of power (sadly perhaps less movie viewing) we are very proud to have been a part of this exciting engineering trial. We are confident that as a company Voller have gained important engineering and use pattern data which will be invaluable to our work in developing the final commercial product scheduled for delivery early in 2008.

Yesterday afternoon saw the landing of another large dorado fish just in time for supper. It was duly filleted by George, fried and served with new potatoes, peas and sweetcorn. We did consider making chips to go with it but thought that hot fat on a rolling boat in high seas was probably not a good idea. Dinner was followed by one of our strange rituals, our after dinner game of eye-spy. Bearing in mind that by then it's pitch black and you can hardly tell where the sea ends and the sky begins and all that you can see is the immediate cockpit, it gets very imaginative. It never fails to raise a few laughs though.

Til tomorrow.

Justine