“Do you have your Mickey Mouse ears?” Tim McDaniel asks, referring to the protective ear-muffs that are needed to enter the engine room. “The engine room is really loud.”

Every time the phone rings in the main engine room, an alarm goes off. It’s a good thing, because the “ears,” combined with the noise of the engines, make it nearly impossible to hear.

The engineers work in shifts around the clock to make sure all the equipment on the ship is operating smoothly.

In the morning, Steve St. Martin and Tim are in charge of monitoring the fuel and freshwater levels. We have 12 fuel tanks on board Revelle. When we left Costa Rica we brought 246,653 gallons of diesel fuel with us. Now, more than halfway through the trip, we’ve used 37,837 gallons. We’ve used about the same volume of fresh water. Each day we make about 2500 gallons of water from the seawater around us.

To make fresh water, seawater is pumped into an evaporator in the engine room and heated in a vacuum to lower the boiling temperature of the water. “The waste heat from the engines evaporates the seawater in a second, turning it to steam,” Steve says. Bundles of tubes carry cold seawater that cools the steam, turning it to fresh water. The condensation collects on the cold tubes, as it would on a cold can of soda on a hot day. “It’s a huge process, we can make 100 gallons of water an hour, depending on the temperature of the sea water,” Steve adds. We then use an ultraviolet light to kill any remaining bacteria. “In the end, it tastes better than bottled water,” Tim says.

In addition to providing heat for making water, the engines drive generators. When we transit to a site, use the trawl winch to dredge, or type on our computers we use the electricity the engine room provides us. The diesel fuel feeds the engines that power the generators. Revelle’s generators provide all the electricity we need, more than enough to power 500 houses. We’re our own small town out here on the ocean; we’re self-sufficient in every way.

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