Yeva, Asea Again

A burlap hero, according to musician Nate Wooley, is a person who recognizes living as a heroic act, who marches, consciously or not, back to the sea in hopes of making no splash. A burlap hero is someone who understands and embraces the imperfection of existence and in that way stretches the definition of sainthood. Burlap heroes may be sailors or explorers, mountaineers or deep-forest hikers. They may be the occupants of sun-up barstools; the cubicle-planted; the ghosts of Greyhounds; or the reasonably sketchy.

Ella Hibbert is joining the illustrious ranks of burlap heroes, finally pulling out of port in Qaqortoq, Greenland, where she's been harbored since last weekend, to resume her solo Arctic Ocean circumnavigation. 

Complications: she pulled into Qaqortoq to repair her heater, kind of a necessity north of the Arctic Circle. Due to the location of the heater in her boat, the repair couldn't be done while at sea. But while troubleshooting the wiring, she managed to trigger a cascade of other electrical issues, her automatic identification system (AIS) - the tracking system that uses transceivers to both identify other vessels and to let other vessels identify her - wind instrument, depth sounder, and autopilot all failing at once. The alarms were blaring, the data gone, essential systems down, and the heater parts weren't even due for delivery to Nuuk, about 300 miles to the northwest, for several more days. But she couldn't safely sail to Nuuk to pick up the parts without any on-board navigation assistance.

After calls with a Raymarine tech and even a ChatGPT session for ideas, and with all the shipboard wiring exposed, she managed to get most of the instruments back online for about 10 minutes, only to have everything glitch back out again. 

After a cold and confusing day of crawling around the boat with wires exposed everywhere, she cleaned the electrical connections, replaced a fuse, swapped out a T-bone on the NMEA 2000 system (whatever that means), and miraculously the navigation equipment, exclusive of the AIS, is now back online again. The AIS seems to be permanently fried, so she'll pick up a new AIS box in addition to a heater in Nuuk (direct delivery to Qaqortoq is hopelessly time consuming to near impossible).

So our burlap hero is now off again, heading up the west coast of Greenland for Nuuk to pick up the heater and AIS parts. She confident sailing without AIS along the Greenland coast up to Nuuk now that she's got her depth sounder and other navigational equipment back on line, but the AIS is essential for the Northwest Passage. The chilly run up to Nuuk will be a good test of the other repairs, however, and (hopefully) build back some confidence in the Yeva's capabilities.