Relaunch likely next week

After I landed at Waikiki Yacht Club on September the 10th, I flew to mainland to see Nancy and to care for a few legal matters. I then gathered about 150 freeze dried breakfast servings into a duffle. I hauled all that back to Waikiki on the 17th.

Michel Swenson of Class of '71 at the Brussels American High School picked me up at the Honolulu airport and has hosted me since. I have great memories from my formative years at that school as part of the Class of '79. I am grateful for the wonderful connections and friendships that our small school has offered over the years.

I completed the few repairs that the rowboat needed. I installed a new chart plotter in the cabin and moved the old one outside. That is a ridiculous amount of redundancy but I already had the cables in place on deck, so I took advantage. I built new flaps for my deck scuppers. Using fiberglass and metal hinges, these will be more resilient than the original plastic flaps which relied on flexing of the thin material. The plastic ones had turned brittle and failed on the way to Waikiki.

I also repositioned the desalination unit lower in the rowboat to make sure that its water intake was lower than sea level. It was originally mounted on the wall of the hold; it is now resting against the hull bottom. In addition, the old raw water filter for the desalinator was a tall 18-inch affair positioned high in the hold which required water to be raised up to its intake then drawn through the filter all by vacuum before reaching the intake of the desalinator.

This resulted in air leaking into the system then accumulating in the tall filter. I had to stop the desalinator after collecting 4-5 liters of potable water then open the filter, which by then would be half full of air, to top it up with sea water. This tedious process made sure that air would not get sucked into the compression chamber of the desalinator which must reach up to 800 psi to operate. Air is compressible, water is not, so air in the chamber would fail water production. I did not want to deal with this with my head down in the hold when I had rough seas or was near hazards.

The desalinator relies on reverse osmosis process, pushing sea water against a tight membrane inside. Salt molecules are larger than water molecules; the membrane captures these larger salt molecules so that potable water sweats behind the membrane. I then collect that potable water for my use; the more saline “brine” still inside the unit is ejected with each pump of the piston in the chamber. Interestingly, that separation at molecular level also means that bacteria or viruses in sea water would also remain in the brine.

I replaced the original tall filter with a shorter one which I also mounted as low as possible in the hold. By creating a positive head at the intake of the desalination unit, these two modifications will solve the problem of air leaking into the system by eliminating the need for vacuum to operate.

My rowboat has a berth at Waikiki Yacht Club inside Ala Wai Boat Harbor. We intend to tow the boat outside the harbor to clean ocean this weekend. The harbor receives polluted runoff from a creek by the same name and I don't want to take a chance of damaging the membrane inside my watermaker. Running the desalinator outside the marina for a good hour will help me make sure that I solved the air leak problem.

I will have another meeting on Monday the 4th with Dr. Nicolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner both from the International Pacific Research Center at University of Hawaii who are adjusting their drift models to simulate my options by rowboat. The 80 days of rowing from Crescent City to Waikiki offered us valuable information to adjust the parameters in their computer model. Following that, my relaunch may be on Tuesday or Wednesday pending weather and completion of tasks.

Erden.