L'Eau Commotion Westabout

12:00 Noon Tuesday 26th June 2018 ( UTC-6 )
The occasional fresh little squalls seemed to have lessened this morning so with the seas moderating it was time to pole out the jib on the Starboard side. Even now it surprises me how many times I can get this simple operation snarled up but anyhow we are all set for I hope a pleasant few days of doing nothing but breezing along. Of course there is always a walk around and one of the necessities of sailing is to keep a clear head so this was the first port of call on the Port side. Everything normal there with the water level just as it should be which is very gratifying with all this talk of rising sea levels in the Pacific Ocean and the resulting catastrophes which await us all if we do nothing. In Biblical times we would have offered up burnt offerings for this reprieve but not having anything suitable to singe I give thanks to the man who is actually doing something about it and Doing It Now. Yes, Jay Wetherill, point man for the Croweaters.
The story starts a ways back but perhaps we could point to the time when Steve Jobs strode across the stage is his trademark turtle neck wielding one of the marvels of the age. I and the technical world wondered how such computing power could be packed into such a slim case and how it could be powered. The latter was easier to understand in the form of of the thin flat Lithium Ion battery and it was at this point also that the technical and financial gurus of National Panasonic realised they had the mother of all lemons on their hands for they had invested heavily in a factory to produce unwieldy oversized Lithium batteries similar to an engorged D size torch battery to power their computers. What to do? It was brought up that Elton Musk was using these cells in his ridiculously overpriced and impractical electric cars so why not sell him the factory and get rid of this Albatross round their necks. He’s a smart man and wouldn’t fall for it was pointed out. Yes he may be but the Green Lobby in the USA isn’t so they promptly raised $5 billion to produce lots and lots of cars that nobody wanted to buy so he now had a surfeit of subsidised cells on his hands. Now being the smart man that he is he sold them back to the same Californians who had paid for them in the first place to power Silicon Valley for when the sun don’t shine. This sounded really neat to our J so with a few off balance sheet shady deals he found himself the owner of $100 million worth of batteries but then realised he had nothing to charge them with as he had closed down those nasty polluting coal fired power stations. Then the obvious solution presented itself - buy lots of containerised diesel generators producing AC current which can then be rectified to charge the batteries whose output can then be inverted to produce Green Power which can be then be sold at a premium into inner Sydney Suburban Green households. Simple . And it works . As a result of say a cost of a Billion Dollars the Pacific Ocean has not risen at all and my toilet hasn’t flooded L’Eau Commotion. I of course could have instead closed the sea cocks but that won’t be necessary as the Science Is Settled.