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Wednesday 9 April 2014

Wibbling round Wittering

I parked at the place I'd chosen as my start point, and started to get the bike ready.

Then I realised - I've left the box of bits behind. That means that I don't have my battery monitor. A battery monitor is very important for a Lipo, because if you run the voltage down too low, it wrecks the battery, and it won't hold charge afterwards.

But I've been using these batteries for a while now, and I have a fair idea how far they go. So I decided to do the battery monitor by guess.

The first circuit went well, apart from having to cross the A1, which is hairy even without a bike; with a bike, it's double plus hairy. It took a very long time before I had a gap in the traffic that I felt was long enough. And then I had to get the bike past the central barrier. But I switched battery at the right point; when I got home and measured the voltage on the batteries I used for this route, they were down to 3.8 volts, which is still quite peppy.

For my second circuit, I used a better strategy. I've made a cable harness that can put four batteries in parallel. And I know that an afternoon's caching isn't going to use up four batteries, so I didn't need to worry.

I'm going to devise a system that means that I won't leave my box-of-bits behind in future.

I passed RAF Wittering, and took this:


Very nice!

I finished the day with an attempt on "You dirty rat". To get that cache, you have to walk up a tunnel mill race (the mill is disused), and although the water is less than knee-deep, there's a very deep section when I was wet up to my thighs.

The last time I came here to attempt this, the whole area was flooded, and the water in the tunnel was up to the roof! Today, it was normal, and I got to my objective.

But I didn't find the cache. I did find a pair of cable ties; maybe the cache has gone?

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