Frustrations with Arithmitick-Amps, Watts, Volts and Hours

The new motor is a game changer. I slid out of the harbor several times after spending a while playing with it. On the way back in from the 3rd load, the battery quit. It is an 80 amp hour deep cycle marine battery charged by a 20 watt solar panel.

So the new motor is a game changer as long as I only want to work about an hour and a half a day. I started doing some remedial algebra in hopes of monkeying the variables. Batteries hold amps. Solar panels deliver my beloved photons turned electrons in watts. The battery gives volts. Motor draws 50 amps at full speed. The unhappy conclusion of my math exam was that a full charge takes days for the solar panel while the motor only takes an hour and a half of full time operation to drain the battery. Then there's the winch that also needs photons.

'Twar the winch who deceived me at the outset. The winch growls and generates huge torque for easily pulling traps up to the boat. I used it for many full days last summer and never seriously dented the photon bank. The battery never registered more than about 25% depleted. I figured that if the winch could work that hard and not run the battery flat, then the motor would perform similarly because it is so quiet and turns in the water, rather than growling up traps. Not so.

Now I have to either have at least a couple batteries charging and swap them, bring the main one in and charge it on household current-losing my zero carbon credibility- or not run the motor much. Too bad, 'cause it's so fun. And easy.

Breaking the Logjam

I'm going to post the actual progress for a while and stop trying to find meaning. I've gotten things rolling with setting traps out for the season. I'm up to 35 after being at it a day and a half. That would take an hour or so in a conventional boat. The weather, tides and other circumstances have made it a challenge.

The good news is that the new electric motor, charged via solar panel, is a game-changer. It is very handy to slide along with a load of traps and not need all the space that 8 foot oars require. I found it strange to get places and not exert myself. I feel like I'm riding an aquatic powered skateboard. It is to my liking.

The less good news is that the same company that sells the motor also sells a "trolling motor power center"- basically a box to keep the battery dry and provide external electrical connections. The problem is that the box is wired with components that stand up to salt water about as well as do wheat thins or kleenex. The works were highly corroded- inside the supposedly waterproof enclosure, from last year. Clayton helped me rip out the rotted tissues and replace a circuit breaker. The other problem is that the external posts corrode together miserably, requiring pliers and threatening to shred the wires attached to the post.

The end result is that the motor can't get power out, and the solar panel can't get photons turned into electrons. I really need photons! They're very helpful to me. Some marine grease is probably called for. LPS 5 or something.

The other report is that solar-electric boats work, at least so far. It's a little early to tell how well the panel will keep up with both the winch and motor.

There's a hummingbird outside the slider. The feeder is empty. I need to find out how much sugar, water and red stuff to put in.

Held Over: The March Hare Show

I want to work. I've waited for good conditions. I've stewed til the stew is stuck and blackened on the bottom of the stewpot in my soul. The mortgage is coming due. The rain, fog and wind seem eternal. My family and I have been away for most of the last month with one thing and another.

This morning there was a 20 minute window of favorable trap setting conditions. That's been it for the last I don't know how long. Unfortunately, I showed up at the harbor after that period expired. As a result, I got a grand total of 5 traps in the water and got thoroughly drenched in the process. It's pouring. I've got other commitments in the afternoon.

Many other frustrations leapt at me. The inner harbor is pretty well useless unless one is parking large skows there and running lines in every direction from them. I installed my mast, sail and radar reflector yesterday and discovered, as I was trying to load traps in the rapidly filling and very congested inner harbor, that I can't get a load on with the mast in. Take it out and hurl the whole business on the banking, along with many verbal unpleasantries.

All the variables are aligned perfectly against me being productive. If you see me, stay clear. I am mad as a March hare when there's been three months' worth of March.

The Return of Sweet Pea

It's a good thing we've had two Marches and swapped May for an extra April. The very tardy transition to warmth, sunshine and calm waters around the island would be making me crazy except that I've had so many other crazinesses and obstacles and unexpected opportunities- yes, let's call these little surprises "unexpected opportunities"- that I hardly noticed that everything is a month behind. I have no traps in the water yet, which puts be behind last year, when I knew not me arse from me stern. The gardens aren't going in. The blossoms aren't coming out. There's hardly any recreational firearm discharge at all coming from the isolated ends of the island.

Among the UO's was a chance to visit at the Carpenter's Boatshop for several days last week. I got to play with boats, recharge in the spirit, and be extravagantly well fed by the same organization that made the whole project possible by delivering Sweet Pea into my family here on Matinicus.

Less fun last week were unexpected road trips, appointments, gambling on being able to stuff the family into a Cessna between fog and showers, and how, right in the middle of the crazy scheduling and coordination, out falls a big chunk of one of my molars.

I found out yesterday that photons take years to escape the sun's core from whence they are liberated. They have to bounce, get absorbed into and then escape many, many times from nuclei of other atoms before they head to earth to jump into my solar panel and charge my system aboard Sweet Pea. The 96 million mile commute is apparently no big deal after ten years inside the sun. I feel as a photon this year, having to collide with and then extricate from all manner of things that take me off the island or away from my work.

It is no small wonder, then, that Sweet Pea is actually ready for salt water. While Lydia was home week before last, she helped clean, sand and refinish the interior. We put a bit of bottom paint on and now just need to borrow a trailer and something to pull it.

There can be no more optimistic smell than linseed oil, turpentine and pine tar on thirsty wood at the beginning of the season. The before and after video appears below.

Me and my photons are outtahere! Pretty soon. I'm figuring. Depends, I guess.

Spring Color

Between last week's rope and this week's buoy work, the grass turned green. Virtually overnight. That's the visible spectrum. On the tactile plane, air temperature and wind are still irksomely lurching between February Fresh and March Miserable. Sunday morning sees winds over 60 miles per hour- the winter gales' welcome long worn out. If it's sunny and there's a sheltered spot and I have a hoody under my Carhartt coat, it's tolerable working outside.

During those interludes when sun and air agree with each other, I paint buoys. This task is the most high gratification type of gear work. There can't be a much more optimistic sight than a hundred or so feet of rope strung between apple trees hung with freshly painted buoys. New paint goes on shiny and smooth over bleached, abraded, barnacled veterans from last season.

On one of the days when sun, wind and rain could find no basis for agreement, I worked in the barn, rigging up 80 new buoys from the seemingly endless pile of junk gear in the back yard. Every time I dig up a bunch of dirt-caked plastic and styrofoam junk and turn it into useable fishing equipment, every time the junk pile gets a little smaller, I am a happy fellow. These new/old buoys are every color and are hardly showroom condition. Many have been hacked up by propellers, scoured against the rocks, and puckered from being pulled underwater too far. They're all different shapes and sizes.

It's a motley, sad collection until the new paint goes on.

Learning the Ropes

I was fortunate as a young person to work on a farm owned by Malcolm and Lucille Jewell in Bowdoinham. It was hard work from the beginning, but with great love and humor and the best kind of character leadership by example. One of Mal’s jokes was about losing money on every hay bale, but the volume keeping him in business. Farming and fishing share a common delusional optimism, a certain level of denial being necessary to overcome what common sense will otherwise tell you. The unit costs don’t even begin to account for weather, broken equipment and other variables. Which in turn leads to another joke about the fisherman (or farmer) asked what he’ll do with his lottery winnings and replying that he’ll “prob'ly keep fishing/farming until the money’s all gone.” Thanks to Tim Sample for that one. Back to volume. My inside-out version of Malcolm’s joke about volume is that my profit margin is sky high on all 27 lobsters that I caught last summer. That is to say volume isn’t happening so far. I have no fuel bill and no expensive repairs, insurance or boat payments. I also don’t catch much, especially when I don’t get up to speed until mid July and get skittish with hurricane warnings in late August. Accordingly, my short and longer term goals for the project involve scaling the operation up. This year that means two hundred traps instead of 150. It also means getting them out and having the operation flowing before July. After making the list entitled: Things That Need to Get Done, But Can’t Possibly Get Done in Time, I started with rope. My operation is amateurishly small compared to proper lobster businesses. Since I fish in close to shore, my trap lines are very short, 15 fathoms being the longest compared to the 55 fathoms and longer commonly used on bigger boats. I only need 200. compared to the guys with 800 traps in the water. Even with the small scale, there are still 12,000 or so feet of rope to be checked, cleaned, mended and untangled. I had to make 55 new 10 fathom lines with red paint at the mid point for whale-proofing, 7 fathoms of sinking rope, 3 fathoms of float rope and a toggle buoy. I dug through an impossible baby elephant sized pile of tangled abandoned rope and buoys in my back yard to get toggle buoys, those small floats fastened partway down the trap line to prevent the line from fouling. It was like wrestling a groggy Jabba the Hutt because the rope pile had long ago melded into a single obstinate mass. Maybe a dog leash business makes more sense. Short pieces would be easy. My hands were winter dainty, having had gloves for any real work. After a couple of days of rope work, I was chafed and leaving my own red marks on the rope. This will insure that if a whale wanders into my front yard, he’ll avoid the rope pile. ‘Nother story there. Anyhoo- my hands are getting tough love or perhaps just plain abuse. The rope pile is done. Nice neat rows of warps in bundles of five. It had been spread out all over the front yard where I’d measured and gridded the pieces out to keep them organized. I was left with only a tiny pile of scraps for recycling. That seemed good. Now to just prepare 200 buoys, fix 200 traps, refinish the inside of the boat, put fresh bottom paint on, and rewire everything. Then it’ll be time to set gear. Then I can start work.

You Know It's Time to Get Going with Gear Work When...

When it's 3 something on a Tuesday afternoon in late March and I find myself washing off toothpaste tubes and toothbrush handles, I know that it is really time to move on to the next phase of the year's workflow cycle. Not that it was an existential make-work placebo task. The dental care drawer in the bathroom was several years overdue for a little refreshment.

The drawer preferred not to close as a result of overcrowding. There were enough toothbrushes for a public high school graduating class. They were caked, stuck together. Then there were the toothpaste tubes, ranging from 90% to about 40% used up. There were two dozen or so of these "pre-owned" units, as they say in the car business. Not all the way and then thrown out, but just most or part way used before a newer tube proved more appealing to the brusher and the remainder was left for the next person to squeeze and roll up neatly from the bottom. This would not have created such a mess but for the fact that the caps were left off all of the deselected tubes.

The geology of the drawer was that as new pre-owned tubes were deselected for service, the next layer added pressure, especially when the tired person scrunched the drawer closed. The resulting matrix consisted of a solid mass of old toothbrushes, tubes and caps. Toothpaste gets pretty stubborn when it's had three or four years to sedimentate and metamorphose. I needed a soup can lid to get a bunch of it dislodged from the drawer.

Now you can see why, because of the length of my description, if from nothing else, I needed to get going on outdoor, fresh air, hand chafing lobsterman work. Everybody else seems pretty far ahead. I'm used to that sensation. I also have the same queer feeling of doing very familiar basic gear work, but in the context of a crazy new-age riverboat gamble of a concept: zero carbon lobster harvesting out of a tiny boat with bockety old used and salvaged fishing gear. Familiar and hare-brained. I know this work well AND what the ---- am I doing?

After unpiling all my things and sorting them into new piles and checking my safety items, I'm starting with rope. Going over the stiff and winter- crusted coils slopped together in a hurry before Hurricane Earl and then in October. A few mends here. A new toggle there. The simplest of tricks for a spindly old dude trying to haul up traps partly by hand- a knot a couple of feet from the trap end, which feels as though it makes that last heave about half as difficult as without the knot.

Then there will be work on traps that strangely are in worse shape than they were last spring, which was not that great. More rust, holes, broken vents, torn heads, missing runners than I remember seeing last spring. Buoys to paint and whale proof. Solar power to reconfigure and rewire. Figuring out new ways to keep everything I need on board and still have room for both feet. No sense getting too drove up about it, 'cause it's going to snow tomorrow.

***

We lost Ronnie last week. His lengthy career in the theater of Matinicus received mixed reviews, but he always took the stage with a flourish- by sea flying a non-tongue-in-cheek Jolly Roger jigger sail, by land in dump trucks, excavators, cranes, tractors, and by air in his spotless J-3 Cub. His oil truck had murals of two of his cats on the sides and "meow" where the last 4 digits of the phone number would normally appear. I will miss his word-play and humor and commitment to the island as a living community instead of a seafood strip mine. Glass raised.