April 26, 2014

Tired

Day after day.  I thought we would have crossed the equator by now but we are just inching along.  I am getting really tired.  We both are.  I discover part of a bottle of electrolytes left over from when Alan was sick and drink the rest of the bottle.  It seems to help.  After that I keep a bottle of water mixed with gatoraide in the cockpit.  Alan drinks 2 pots of coffee a day and still sleeps. I don’t know how he does it.  I do not like the taste of the coffee much any more, it tastes really bitter.  I have a stash of energy drinks and caffeine pills to help me get through the long night watch.  When Alan shows up with coffee and oatmeal in the morning I am ready to just fall into bed.  However, we usually  have to reset the sails before I can rest, adding another hour at least to my watch.  The record was 12 hours with just 2 short potty breaks.  I keep hoping that he will get caught up on his sleep but it does not seem to be happening.  If I get him up early to relieve me he just falls asleep at the helm and I have to take over again.  One nice thing is that I do not have to pay too much attention to our surroundings.  There is no land to run into for hundreds of miles, actually thousands.  We have not seen another boat for 2 weeks and are well out of the shipping lanes.

I listen to music until my phone dies.  Now it will not charge.   There is an iPod but I have trouble getting it to work while gripping the tiller with both hands and it does not have a waterproof case.   I had planned to listen to French language lessons but it is on the inside radio.  One of the unfinished projects is the on-deck speaker for the cabin sound system.  I play endless games of solitaire on the iPad until I use up the battery.  I read some but that uses up more battery.  Our solar battery that we bought to charge all our computers has stopped working.  Alan thinks it is because it got wet and a cable is corroded.  You would think a solar system wold be waterproof.  The priority of charging is the 2 iPads which have the navigation program.  We run the generator every 3 days to run the water maker.  It needs to be run every few days to keep the filters clean, regardless of whether we need water so while it is on we can also charge things.  We run the engine every week or so for the same reason, to keep the batteries charged and just to be sure it is still working OK.

One more frustration, the light in the galley quit working the day we left.  This means that I have to rely on our little solar reading lights when it is time to cook dinner.  If they did not get put out to charge during the day then I am reduced to using a flashlight to find what I need and cooking in the dim light of the overhead cabin light.  I have put a little stick-on battery light over the stove but of course the batteries are dead and we are running low on batteries.  We have a supply of rechargeables but again we need to remember to put them into the solar chargers and put them out into the sun light to charge.  One interesting face, since we are so close to the equator we get 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark.  I had not realized how much I expect it to stay light until 7 or a pm when the weather is warm.  This means I am always cooking dinner after dark.  6 pm, the sun goes down and it is dark, 6 am the sun is up.