Bradley Wiggins onboard
I love watching the Tour de France, in part because in my non-cruising life I used to ride pushbikes, but also for the complex strategy of the teams overlaid on the sheer physical impossibility of what the cyclists do. Distances, speeds and hill climbs far beyond normal, stacked day after day. It is impressive, and apparently drug free!
Anyway, imagine my surprise when Bradley Wiggins walked by our boat in the marina. I recognised him immediately, invited him onboard and as it was not the cycling season he agreed. Okay, it was more of an agreement in the way of old maritime traditions but the point is we took him to sea for a couple of weeks.
For reasons I shall explain shortly we had to let him go, but first some background.
All long distance cruising sailors know the critical issue of power management onboard. It could be argued that we have gone soft but we like a cold chardonnay at the end of a day of sailing. When we go for a swim we like to shower in fresh water from our watermaker, or if the weather is hot an icecream from the freezer while watching the sun set. This is really what cruising is all about. And it is no good pointing out that they flew to the moon on Apollo 11 with a computer that wasn’t even a chip of the one that drives our navigation. They didn’t have rocks or islands or other things to run into so we need a bigger computer than astronauts do. The trouble is this all takes power. Electrical power.
Now I had been working on this idea for some time, but coupled with our need for power was the fact that we don’t get enough exercise. Onboard when cruising we spend a lot of time sitting down not doing very much, and aside from rare moments of terror when storms rage there is little to get the heart rate up. This sedentary lifestyle and lack of fitness is not a healthy way to live. At home, we might join a gym, and it was while thinking of this that I hit upon my genius idea. I’d mount an exercise bike on the stern rail and link it to the batteries. I’d charge the batteries while getting my daily exercise.
It was no simple thing to engineer as on a pitching boat it would be impossible to ride a stationary bike, but by removing the wheels and hanging the bike from the davits I had a workable system. I ran heavy duty electrical wire from a hub mounted generator via a voltage regulator to the battery bank. It took several goes to get the right generator power but eventually I got it set. When riding I could pump as much as 15 amps and it was such a good workout that 30 minutes was all I could do.
We took turns, half an hour each once a day but it was soon apparent that this was not enough. To run our yacht sustainably we needed more. I thought perhaps as we got fitter and stronger we might increase the generator power and this was when I began researching how much power we might produce by cycling. This was when I learnt about Bradley Wiggins and his world record attempt.
There is a category in competitive cycling of the furthest distance travelled in one hour and Bradley Wiggins wanted to break it. More than that, he wanted to set 55km as the new record because 55km was like the four minute mile. He trained in Scotland with his team of coaches and bicycle engineers and when the time came to do the record attempt they moved to London where he broke the record. However, he could only manage 54.5km km not the 55 km he had hoped for as in London the air was thicker and thick air takes more energy to ride through.
It was the detail his coaches understood about power output that I was interested in. A fit average cyclist like you or me might produce 200 watts, translating on my exercise power generator to 15 or so amps into the 12 volt battery. Bradley Wiggins could ride aerobically, that is continuously, at 420 watts. To beat the hour record he averaged a staggering 440 watts and so presumably he did get a bit of a sweat up.
He might not have beaten the 55km but he could sit on our stern rail at a mere 420 watts and by the end of the day have fed over 300 amp hours into our batteries. He wouldn’t even be puffing and we could have cold drinks and hot showers.
The maths of it was so compelling and I was musing on this when he walked by, so without thinking I threw a hessian bag over him and wrapped him up in some old sheet rope and bundled him into the bilge.
At sea the next day he was really good about it. I explained the situation and added that it would be the best training for his next tour, out of the prying eyes of competitor coaches or the paparazzi. He mounted the bike and began pumping serious amounts of voltage into the batteries. Every two hours we gave him a break. Kerryn cooked some muffins that he ate with gusto, along with some sugary ginger beer that we added some electrolytes to.
For lunch we had pasta and dinner was fresh fish with potatoes and salad. He wasn’t so keen on the salad but had several serves of the potatoes.
For breakfast he ate half a box of wheatbix with sugar and yoghurt and I was beginning already to see the flaw in my plan. He rode all day with just short breaks. By afternoon we were running the water heater and desalinator just to use the power he was producing. Kerryn had a long hot shower and washed her hair, then cooked three batches of muffins. In the pressure cooker she made an extra large serve of curry with the idea we could reheat portions over the next few days to serve with fresh cooked rice, but by the next day it was all gone.
Within a week we were getting low on food and had run out of breakfast cereal completely. I spent a lot of time baking bread and between batches I sat near the stern rail fishing with the trolling line, trying to augment our food supply and idly chatting with Bradley who didn’t miss a beat. If he was sweating it was only when the wind was light and the sun hot so I’d rig a beach umbrella to provide shade for him.
I was so busy with all these other things I neglected the most fundamental of sailing tasks, to always keep an eye on the weather. It was the tenth day and the wind began to rise. It was a tail wind so of no real concern, but by noon the waves began to peak and we reduced sail until at Bradley’s afternoon tea break we were bare poles. He was about to mount the bike again when I suggested we all go below to wait out the storm, and no sooner had I said it than a monster wave rose up and smashed into the bike. A second wave, then a third, and it was time to stream the drogue.
Thing was, in setting up the bike and its gimbal system I had disconnected the drogue anchor points, so now, hanging over the stern while wildly bucking about, I loosened the bolts so I could re-attach it. No sooner had I undone the bolts when another freak wave hit us and the whole bike and gimbal assembly tore loose and fell into the sea. The power cable held it and I had time to grab the nearest line and apply a lashing. This nearest line happened to be the drogue line.
The storm was now worse than ever. Wind screamed through the rigging. The boat surfed down huge waves and smashed into pure green water in the trough, and at each of these I was soaked, plunged underwater while I held my breath. I had to do something or we’d be lost.
Just then the electrical cable, already stretched taut, broke, and the exercise bike assembly began to sink. Thinking quickly I slowed the drogue line and watched the bike dragging behind, at first in the next wave, then as I eased the line out into the wave behind and so on into the distance. I fed out the entire line and lashed it to the stern cleats. The jerking of the boat stopped and we rolled gently, settling as if we were a duck on a somewhat unsettled pond.
Giant waves rolled by and the wind was still screaming but we were safe. We rode out the storm and when it was over Kerryn cooked up our remaining food into a hotch potch stew. It was delicious, but then any food after a storm is delicious. We dropped Bradley Wiggins off in the next harbour and invited him to sail with us again anytime he wished. As well as being an awesome athlete he is a top bloke, for he agreed not to press charges.
If you don’t believe me, google “Bradley Wiggins hour record”. This story is an extract from ‘Sailing the Seven Sustainable Seas’ available at Apple Books Preview or other eBook retailers.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/sailing-the-seven-sustainable-seas/id1569042654
