Black Hole Batteries
Communicating technical details is hard enough if you’re speaking the same language. But poor Amari had battery issues while we were in Barcelona, so we had a repair guy come out to install new ones.
To say he knew little English would be an overstatement. If I had to round off how much English he knew to the nearest whole number. Well that’d be zero. A nice round number. But despite the language difficulties, this person was totally game to work with us in spite of our lack of Spanish. Plus, when you see this video tell me this man doesn’t look just like Ernest Borgnine!
So we busted out Google Translate and, oddly, it actually had a net positive effect. See Dottie and Ernest suss out the details of what we need in this clip.
In the image for the video does make it look like he’s praying to the gods that his next clients would please please speak Spanish, but he’s actually rehearsing what he wants to communicate before speaking into the translator program.
The Battery Backstory
These batteries are called AGMs, and are each just a bit longer than a standard hard shell luggage carry-on. But somehow this little package has the density of a neutron star. Seriously. I don’t know how they got them to be this heavy without slipping a spoonful of black hole into the casing. It’s like it’s bolted to the ground.
One of these monsters is dedicated only to starting the engine. That's all it does. Another three of them live in the forward cabin, under the berth. One of those cranks the bow thruster and windlass (the thing that hoists our anchor off the bottom). Then the remaining ones are needed to run our lights, power the refrigerator, and keep our ice frozen in the freezer.
We had to figure out how to get these beasts down into the cabin and then take them forward into the berth without destroying the woodwork.
In an effort to use less of our backs and a wee tad more of our brains, Ernest and Co had us clip it to our halyard line and use the wench on the mast to suspend it for a controlled descent down the forward hatch into the forward berth.
In this video, I worked the wench as the assistant guided the batteries down the hatch. Check out the disembodied hands that seem reach up out of nowhere to shepherd it down.
The old batteries had to be removed as well, so we cranked them up the hatch, and then the helper pulled it forward still on the halyard. The 8 year old who lives in my brain offered, “you know, if you let that black hole swing that far out on the bow it would totally destroy our entire mast!.”
Needless to say, the 8 year old was put in timeout and the adult stepped up prevent exactly that kind of thing from happening. But the only thing I could do to help was to be reassuring. Admittedly this was done in a language he doesn't know.
Me [in soothing tones, miming the universal combo communication of a thumbs up + head-nodding + slightly pleading eyes]: That's gooood. Yes, hold oonnn. Great joooob. Hang on to that friggin thing.
In the end Ernest and Co did a marvelous job, the new batteries now do their work in silent efficiency, and the old batteries went away to wherever the Spanish take them to recycle black holes. Mission accomplished!
