A Great Australian Adventure (Part 5)

Day 2 began with a 5.30am wake up call, peanuts compared to the 4am of the day before.

The team broke camp fairly quickly whilst the solar array was propped up to receive as much of the morning sun as possible. Unfortunately, the campsite was surrounded by trees, meaning there were copious amounts of shadow and precious little direct sunlight to generate energy from.

Given the state of our battery, we decided to put the car on the trailer and drive to the next control point, Dunmarra, which is about 631 km from Darwin. We unloaded at Dunmarra, with our electrical team estimating the battery pack would be about half full after charging for 3 hours on the back of the trailer.

Prepping the car at Dunmarra

I hopped in the car and we promptly got underway. The stint was tremendously exciting for me, as it was the first time I got to drive the car in the race, and it sort of hit me as we pulled out onto the Stuart Highway that this was it - I was in this car that we had built, driving across the outback in the World Solar Challenge.

What followed was a really nice stint in the car. Ed, the electrical team member who was on telemetry, and I worked together closely to keep the power consumption completely neutral - i.e. using only what energy we could draw from the array. In order to do this, he monitored a graph and was constantly on the radio telling me to speed up slightly or slow down slightly, and I would adjust the throttle as needed.

Two and a half hours later, we stopped to change drivers to Emil. My back ached, my bladder was feeling rather full and I was sweaty and tired, but that didn't stop me from having a huge smile on my face as I jumped out. It was a great stint.

Unfortunately, the rest of the day didn't turn out so well. Emil got underway, and then we suddenly drove into a huge cloud bank, which actually turned out to be the result of a bush fire.

Bush fire

Needless to say, with the sky completely overcast, the array was getting absolutely no power, and with the battery already mostly depleted; there was no choice but for the team to put the car on the trailer and carry on from there.

After clearing the worst of the cloud, the sky was still hazy. We stopped early to point the array at the sun, hoping to gather as much energy as we could. After the good start to the day, it was frustrating that once again we had to put the car on the trailer, and although the sunset was spectacular, it didn't make for ideal conditions as far as charging the battery was concerned. Thus ended Day 2.

Day 2 sunset

Day 3 picked up pretty much where Day 2 left off, with patchy cloud and the team waking up before the dawn to get the array pointing at the rising sun. As the sun climbed higher, the clouds began to dissipate, although there was still a lot of haze around.

Levitating screwdrivers: a good omen...

However, conditions were good enough to drive so Lucy got in the car and we set off. I was pretty jealous of her as the stint proved to be a really good one, and not only was the car working well; the road was joyous to drive, with lovely winding turns and plenty of downhills which Endeavour flew down. Before we knew it, the team had arrived in Tennant Creek.

It was an extremely busy stop, with lots of teams waiting around. It turned out that because bush fires had caused road closures, the race was effectively put on hold for four hours. This was a godsend for us, as it allowed us to get four hours of charging in what was effectively midday sun. By the time we were released in the late afternoon, the battery was full.

The final stint of the day took us to Devil's Marbles, a spectacular collection of outback rocks. But not only was the scenery good, our moods were good too; Day 3 was the first day we completed fully on solar power. The car also seemed to be working well, although it required a change of tyres which was swiftly completed before the sun had set. Dinner that night was a barbecue, which was well received; nothing like a kangaroo sausage after a long hard days drive.

Devil's Marbles indeed.

The Campsite

My abiding memory of this night however, was of playing the Corn Cob game. It was a game involving several corn cobs which were left over from dinner. In the pitch darkness of the outback night, we decided that a competition was to be held to see who could throw their corn cob furthest into the outback. However, with no visual aids, the only way to judge was to listen for the soft thud as tasty snack food met outback dirt. Perhaps that we played the game at all was a sign of the mental degradation that was a natural result of spending all day cooped up in cars with one another and getting very little sleep, but it was hilarious.

This night was also memorable because of the fact that three mantis' found their deaths (indirectly) at my hands. One flew into left over cooking oil and died, another flew into the washing up water and died, and a third...I don't remember how it died, but it did, probably from flying into something it wasn't supposed to. As  Arjun, our lead car driver so eloquently summed up: "For insects that know kung-fu, they fly like retards." Tru dat.

The most important thing though was that it felt like our luck had finally turned. We had dealt with sloppy shipping companies, car crashes, broken steering wheels, road trains and hills and a flat battery and it seemed finally that the weather was turning good and we would be able to get some trouble free days to really rack up the solar kilometres. I was seriously looking forward to Day 4, where I would get the chance to drive again.