News

Saturday, 24 October 2026
Noon Position:: 23° 42.0’N x 058° 18.3’W
Ship Heading: 220 psc
Ship Speed: 1.8 kn
Log: 1768.8 nm
Weather / Wind / Sail Plan: Wind ESE, F2, motorsailing under the stays’l and jib. Blue sunny skies
Location: North American Basin, looking for the trade winds!

The engineers onboard always know what day of the week it is. The main part of our job is staying ahead, catching any little issues before they can grow big, with preventative maintenance around the vessel. Mondays we swap refrigeration systems, Tuesdays we check engine belts and batteries, Wednesdays there is a whole separate list of monthly maintenance we attend to, Thursdays are everyone’s favorite – exercising saltwater valves and emergency pumps, and Fridays we run the outboard engine on the inflatable tender and check that the watermakers are happy! This system of checks and redundancy ensures Soren and I get eyes on and operate all of the behind-the-scenes systems that keep the ship and her crew safe and comfy on the open ocean. Once we’re out of sight of the luxuries of land, all we have is each other and what the ship can provide, so staying on top of managing our limited resources is paramount.

Weekends, if all is operating well, are reserved for smaller projects and standing by, daily preventative maintenance checks only and checking in with students on deck to see if they are jazzed about a particular system or piece of machinery. Beyond this, we hope to only be “on call” for what needs fixing and spend the day resting, reveling in little moments of self-care, reading, crafting, and chilling with shipmates. A bored engineer means a happy, healthy ship.

Now with barely over two weeks left of our journey onboard (wild how time behaves out here!), some interesting engineering related data. Each day at noon I record what resources, fuel and potable water, we have consumed and how many hours each of the engines has run over the previous 24 hours. Prudently out running weather systems, we’ve used the D-sail, our diesel-fueled 500 horsepower Cummins KTA19M main engine, when the wind is not cooperating, either there isn’t enough breeze, it’s coming from the wrong direction, or there is weather headed our way we’d like to avoid sooner than later. Between the main engine supplementing sailing (always our primary option when able!) and our 40-kilowatt generator running most hours of the day, we’ve been averaging about 54 gallons of diesel fuel a day. This may sound like a lot, but with 38 souls aboard that amounts to less than 1.5 gallons of fuel per person per day! Similarly, we carry almost 6000 gallons of freshwater onboard and have been consuming approximately 440 gallons of fresh water a day, only 11.5 gallons per person! I’m always amazed and proud of our resource management in comparison to average daily consumption rates at home, and hope that knowing what little we can all not only get by on but thrive on is a nugget of truth that will stick with the crew no matter where their next journey takes them.

Chief Engineer, Clare, (alumna S-254)