Air Breeze In The Arctic

Air Breeze In The Arctic
By: Chris Bray

Gliding from behind an iceberg with her beautifully tanned, junk-rigged sail, you’d be forgiven for thinking the “Teleport” was a simple boat, with simple needs. You’d be wrong, however, and as the stainless steel stern arch slid into view - bristling with antennas, radar domes, solar panels and topped with a quietly purring Air Breeze wind turbine – you’d definitely know something serious was going on. But what?

While cycling around Tasmania in 2008, my girlfriend Jess Taunton and I heard of this little yacht going cheap in a carpark on the other side of the world in Halifax, Canada. By the time we got there in the summer of 2010, she was in a sorry state – rot had spread throughout the cockpit and side deck, a delaminated section of keel bulged with water, and the roof itself leaked when it rained.

“You’re going to sail that, where?” Our plan to sail her home to Australia, over the top of Canada through the Arctic’s infamous Northwest Passage, was ambitious to say the least. More people have been into space than have sailed through there. But together we worked like zombies for three months, ripping out the rotten wood, re-fiberglassing the deck, and fixing the keel, the wiring, the ropes, the insulation and even the prehistoric single-cylinder engine. Not only did she float, but she survived several white-knuckle sea-trials before we had to fly home and keep saving.

In May 2011 we returned for the final preps – wiring her up with enough technology to make a yacht twice her length blush: A radar; an AIS Watchmate system; a GPS chartplotter; radios; an electrically-controlled diesel furnace; two laptops running ‘xGate’ that could connect to the internet and download weather GRIB files and update our website via two Iridium satellite phones; a Solara tracker linked to a live Google Earth map online; and no less than seven cameras! How were we going to keep all those things charged? The answer, as it turned out, was blowing in the wind!

I grew up sailing around the world with my family for five years, and back then, wind turbines were noisy, inefficient and downright dangerous: During one gale, I remember the entire spinning hub – blades and all – actually broke free and ninja-starred off into the night. My dad never bought another one. Researching for this trip however, I knew technology must have improved, and it didn’t take long to hear about the awesome AIR Breeze wind turbine from Southwest Windpower. I had to get one!

I needed to build an arch to mount my radar and antennas anyway, so it was easy to make one of the uprights a little higher and clamp the Air Breeze on, neatly running the wires internally back to a switch beside my batteries. Flicking this ‘ON’, a grin spread over my face as - even in the light breeze - the blades began to spin. Turning it ‘OFF’ they stopped – a feature I became very thankful for in the months ahead when working near the turbine, or stopping alongside a wharf. Amazingly, if the wind becomes too strong - or if it detects that your batteries are already full – it simply turns off automatically!

We set off mid-June, sailing up the spectacular coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and then endured twelve days across the Labrador Sea to Greenland. About half way across we were caught in a nightmare storm during which several things onboard failed (including the engine and alternator), but our wind turbine – out in the worst of it - just kept on merrily humming power into our batteries, sometimes as much as 15 amps! It was brilliant - what with all the icebergs along the Greenland coast, the lack of charted depths through much of Northwest Passage, the unpredictable winds, and the hungry wildlife (like the polar bear that chewed my camera) – we had more than enough to worry about on this unforgettable adventure, so it was great not having to stress over battery levels too – it was so simple, it just worked, and kept working.

We finished this season in Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island – lifting Teleport clear of winter’s crushing sea-ice into a cradle we built, ready to return June 2012 to continue the adventure!