Pace the examiner and Vlad the Impaler, who I can hear in the distance sharpening his stake.
We have a smidge over 4000 miles to Dutch. The next 700 or so of that is potentially windless. We may or may not have an engine. We have about 300 litres of diesel and 5 litres of oil. We need about 3.5 amps to run the computer and instruments. The airgen can carry that - mostly - when we have wind.
So - lets say 40 days to Dutch. We desperately need wind - to motor 700 miles would use all our diesel but we can work the little breeze there is and squeak along. Yesterday we did 60 miles - so perhaps 11 - 12 days to the trades.
Seems to me that the best bet is to monitor the engine very carefully and use it as necessary to get through the holes and up to 5 deg N and - I hope - some real wind. We need to keep about 80 - 100 litres of diesel for the N pacific, so we have perhaps 200 litres or 100+ hours of motoring @ about 4 knots = about 400 miles of the 700.
Really skinny but manageable as long as the engine lasts. If the engine really has the dickies, then it's a long sail with very limited comms and whatever the airgen will give us to run the systems. Water will definitely be a problem.
David, your polarity lecture worked. Silly really in the light of the rest of this note, but we now have the fan in the system with the lights, so I can use the cig lighter socket for other things like charging the mp3 player. Yay!
