Day 98 on the Mississippi River

Day 98

September 12, 2022

Monday

LRM 553

1742 miles completed

I paddled 33 miles today.

Phillip is the name I couldn’t remember on yesterday’s blog post. Phillip Fourie is the third member of the group from Cape Town, South Africa.

Today I camped on a sandbar. I am about 17 miles from the landing in Greenville where I hope to meet up with Park Neff tomorrow. I plan to get a rest day and recharge all of my electronics.

Yesterday I was able to get water, but I was not able to recharge my batteries. As a result I have been turning my phone off to conserve battery in case I have an emergency.

So, today I’m going to write  about how I keep my phone charged. Maybe I can give you  some helpful information.

My equipment:

• Power Bank battery, 26,800 mAh. It has four indicator lights: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. This is my favorite. It will charge up from totally dead to 100% overnight. It will charge my phone four times on one charge. It has a little solar panel on the side that doesn’t do anything that I can tell. I have left it out in full sun for two days in a row and it was still blinking on 25%.

• ANKER battery, 20,000 mAh. It has four indicator lights: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. This battery takes way too long to charge. To go from totally dead to fully charged takes at least 24 hours.  It will charge my phone three times.

• onn Battery, 10,000 mAh. It has a digital readout for charge percent. It will charge overnight. It will charge my phone two times if my phone is not totally dead.

• ANKER trifold PowerPort Solar charger. This solar charger will charge my 10,000 mAh battery from 0% to 100% in 10 hours of full sunlight. It will not charge my battery if it’s cloudy.

• iPhone 11 ProMax.

• Garmin watch. It has to be charged about once a week if I do not use the GPS. One of my battery packs will charge it up in about two hours.

My phone battery will run down by mid afternoon if I am running some tracking app such as Strava. Recharging in the afternoon is problematic, because I have to take it out of its waterproof case. This is dangerous when you’re paddling. So in order to charge my phone while paddling I put the battery pack and the phone inside a waterproof dry bag that I keep on deck. I stopped using Strava. Now I don’t have to recharge during the middle of the day. My family can keep up with where I am using Life360 or FindMy.

My solar charger is a little bit troublesome.  I have to keep it spread out in the sunlight. I have to secure it so it doesn’t fall overboard. I have to plug it into the device that I’m charging. Now the device is exposed to the possibility of water. The solar charger itself is waterproof. I have dropped the solar charger and a battery in the water while they were connected. I unpluged them dried the connectors and they still work.

I also have a marine radio and an electric razor. These both require 110 V for charging. I don’t know how long it takes to charge them. I leave them plugged in overnight.