Day 25 : Ascension to Azores

Monday, April 11th 2022

“Just crash it into the bloody deck”, yells Jen, for the 3rd time in less than a minute.

I don’t respond. I’m concentrating too hard – trying to compensate for wind and Steely’s forward momentum, as I pilot the drone towards the boat, and Jen’s outstretched arm.

I’ve already tried, and failed, to land it at least 4 times. Our usual process is to have it hover just off the back of the boat, away from all rigging. Jen leans out and carefully plucks it out of the air from underneath, keeping her hand as far away from the rotating blades as possible.

But usually we’re not out in the middle of the ocean. With the sails up. Sailing along at 4 knots.

At least this wasn’t MY hare-brained idea. The night before, as I came on watch at 5am, Jen’s parting shot as she disappeared down below was “We should fly the drone today”.

I was initially resistant – we’ve never flown it at sea, and for good reason. Drones are designed to take off and land from the ground, not the heaving deck of a boat, with rigging all around. We have gotten adept at taking off and landing from Jen’s hand at anchor, and as described above, this does work, at least in terms of keeping the drone away from the rig.

But when the boat is bouncing up and down, and moving along, it’s nigh on impossible.

Several keen YouTuber Vloggers seem to manage it OK. But the emphasis is on the word “seem” – it’s common practice for them to lose their drones into the ocean, never to be seen again. Which is OK when that’s just a business expense, but for us, it’s $1,500 risk we’re not prepared to take for the sake for some good footage.

Or at least we hadn’t been, until now.

Throughout my watch, Jen’s idea germinated a little. We’ve hardly used the drone in the last two years. Early in Covid, while we were stuck in the Maldives, we noticed that the batteries had started swelling (seemingly quite common with DJI drone lithium batteries). That makes it dangerous to fly, as the battery no longer fits the compartment perfectly, and thus might pop out at any time, causing the drone to lose power and plummet to earth.

Replacing the batteries there was a non-starter, and in fact it proved to be a challenge for some time to come. In the end, I bought some on Amazon when we were in the Seychelles, and shipped them in, which was no easy task, as shipping lithium batteries comes with a LOT of regulations.

But in the year since we’ve had the batteries, I’ve been a little gun-shy about using it. Partially just lack of practice (and it takes a lot of practice to fly it well), and partially I’ve just kept forgetting we had it when we’ve gone on interesting hikes.

More recently, we flew it in St Helena, and during those flights we first articulated the thought that was now reverberating in my mind.

“There’s no point in having it, and not flying it for fear of losing it. In that case, you might as well already have lost it, since you’re not getting the fun of flying it.”

It was quite a liberating thought, and was what spurred me on at St Helena to launch it off a cliff, content that if I got it wrong and never saw it again, well at least it died doing what it was born to do, rather than sitting in a locker gathering dust.

And now the same logic seemed to apply to flying it off the boat while at sea. I’ve always wanted to get footage of us sailing along. And this did seem to be a good time to do it. We’d just entered the Azores High, so the wind was light or non-existent. The sea was flat calm and looked beautiful – the perfect backdrop to show Steely all alone in the vast Atlantic Ocean.

I started composing all the shots I wanted to take in my mind’s eye. And as I thought about the resulting footage, it seemed to be a risk worth taking.

By the time Jen came up at 9am, I was brim full of enthusiasm. Jen, on the other hand, had had plenty of time to think about the folly of planting this particular seed, and was having serious second thoughts.

“I’m not sure our marriage could survive the stress”, she joked.

We talked it through, agreed that it was only a toy, and wasn’t the end of the world if we lost it, and that so long as we accepted that it would be stressful, and we planned our take off and landing strategies in advance, it should be OK.

One hour later, the drone was in the air.

And 15 minutes after that, the low battery warning told me it was time to put our marriage to the test.

Although we’ve put away the head sail, and have up only main and mizzen, and the wind is less than 7 knots, we can’t seem to slow the boat down much. And time is running out, so we need to get on with it.

The first four attempts don’t go well. I can bring the drone close to the boat, but I can’t hold it stationary in position relative to the boat for long enough to give Jen the chance to grab it. It just keeps drifting backwards (well, Steely keeps sailing away from it). And with the heaving of the deck in the swell, the relative height of the drone is changing a lot too. With a 1.5 m swell, the water is coming perilously close to the drone every few seconds, causing it’s sensors to make it try to fly away from the water.

I thought I’d turned them all off, but it seems like I’d missed one.

Just then, and without me doing a thing, the drone flies away from the boat at top speed, gaining altitude quickly as it does so. Within 20 seconds, it’s at a height of 40 metres, and 200 metres way from the boat.

A new warning message came up on screen: “Battery level critical, fly home engaged”

Again, I could have sworn I’d turned this setting off, but the drone, in a potentially suicidal act of what it thought was self-preservation, had decided it needed to return to the point it took off from and land itself, since I clearly couldn’t be trusted. It, of course, was oblivious to the fact that Steely was no longer in the spot it was when the drone took off.

Desperately I peck my way through the menus, trying to find and turn off the setting. There’s now less than 90 seconds left on the battery, after which point the drone will just drop like a stone into the sea.

I find the setting and turn it off, doing my best to drown out the alarms, and Jen’s “encouragement”.

I turn on “sport mode” and fly the drone back to the boat at top speed.

60 seconds left on the battery.

“It’s pretty much done”, I say, despondently. “There’s no way we’re going to land this.”

Again, Jen yells at me just to crash land the drone onto the deck.

But that’s easier said than done – I can’t even line the drone up to attempt to do that, as the boat keeps sailing forward.

I don’t want to crash the drone into the side of the hull, it needs to get over the lifelines and above the deck before it hits something and drops down. But finding that gap to aim for seems harder than hovering the drone off the back of the boat.

Over the din of the increasingly strident critical battery warning klaxons, I lose my cool and yell at Jen “ I’m TRYING, I’m TRYING”

30 seconds left.

Jen has walked away from her catching zone, to leave space for me to crash the drone onto the aft deck, but I’m now convinced it’s not my best option.

With no time to explain why not, I simply yell again” Get back to the edge, I’m going to try one more time”

As Jen leans out again, I fly the drone towards her. I miss, and it overshoots, missing the solar panels by less than 5 cm. As I correct and bring it back, it flies right at Jen . With the fearlessness of a lion, she thrusts her hand out and plucks it out of the air as it flies towards her at top speed.

“Arrghh” she yells, as the blade catch her fingers, but she doesn’t let go. She turns the drone upside down, which automatically shuts down the motor.

What a hero.

There’s a little bit of blood, but not too much. And there’s a lot of relieved laughter, a hug, and an immediate commitment to never, ever do this again.

“You did remember to press record in the video before we sent it up”, asked Jen?

Day 25 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 24 days, 21 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 122 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 5.1 knots

Official Length of intended Route when we set out: 3,480 nm
Current Projected Distance to Go according to chart plotter: 844 nm
Distance Sailed so Far: 2,931 nm
Total Projected Distance of Route: (2,931+ 804): 3,735 nm
Change in total projected distance in last 24 hours: +82 miles (I have started plotting our storm-surfing path as best I can with the info PredictWind is giving us, accounting for an expected 82 miles further to sail to keep in the optimum wind levels)

Estimated Day of Arrival: Predict Wind is now saying 1.40 pm on Sunday 17th April

Total amount of decent footage gained from Drone Flight: 4 minutes. I DID remember to press record, but I had a heart in mouth moment when I tried to find the footage immediately after Jen asked me the question, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then remembered that last time I’d used the drone, I’d changed the destination for the footage onto the removable SD card, rather than the drone itself, so I needed to connect the SD card to my computer to retrieve the footage. Phew!