Opening day for the Art Shanty Projects today went great. Big crowds and even bigger wind. The good news for us was that our shanty held up to 30 mile an hour winds. Big relief. The bad news was that we haven’t gotten the bike generators to work. Yet. We think it may be a faulty alternator. We had it tested yesterday and were told it was broken. Then had it repaired, but we still couldn’t get power…. We served up coffee, tea and cocoa using the battery power we had, and hooked up two 5W solar panels (courtesy of Tamsie Ringler). The batteries brewed our 200 W coffee maker for four hours and we ran our good ol propane coleman duel burner to boil water and make French press coffee and wash dishes. We also had trouble with the heaters. Lil buddy wasn’t having any of it, but the Pod was surprisingly comfortable, although a bit loud from the wind. Once it warms up we’ll tighten the cover. We plan on having at least one generator running by next weekend, and we’ll be out on the ice tomorrow and Monday. We have a nice view from inside the Pod of the Shanty Village. I only had time to check out a few of our neighboring shanties and did manage to sing a few songs at the Norae Shanty... Barry White, Sinatra and the Temptations. There are some brave shanty artists living at the Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition. It is well worth a visit to their outpost.
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