Well, the sailing is going swimmingly. Jazz’s butt is now as brown as the rest of her body, so that’s one goal for the trip accomplished. Browning for Andrew’s behind is lagging behind. Jazz also made her first successful satellite phone call. While it was nice to talk to Alex about her upcoming wedding, the lag makes it difficult, by and the compression can’t really keep up with the speed of Jazz’s speech.
In less fun news, we noticed yesterday evening that the batteries were lower than we expected. Looking at the monitoring, we found that power from one of the solar arrays was really low. Some of the other data looked funny, so we looked at the wiring and found that the fuse holder had started to melt. Not enough to break the connection, and the fuse didn’t blow, but clearly something was creating resistance, which creates heat, which creates more melting, and so on. Of course, we’re carrying a replacement fuse, but not a whole holder. Our first attempt to macguiver a replacement failed after a couple of hours, and we had the hubris to put the battery compartment back together after the first checks passed, so our afternoon’s work is cut out for us.
1434 miles to go on the rhumb line.