March 12, 2007 — A speed boat running on recycled vegetable oil set out on Saturday to break the record for circumnavigating the globe. Now the boat is limping toward its first port of call with propeller blades so badly deteriorated the race may be called off.
"I'm really worried we might not actually make Panama now," wrote Pete Bethune, captain of the biodiesel boat Earthrace, in the project's Weblog on Sunday. "The fantastic efficiency of these props (propellers) was supposed to give us an edge, but instead their reliability has cost us dearly."
Bethune and a crew of two left Barbados on Saturday for what they hoped would be a 65-day cruise into the record books. The point of the project is to raise awareness for renewable energy sources.
The current speed record for an around-the-world cruise by boat is 75 days. Earthrace is the first boat running off non-petroleum fuel to make a bid for the record.
Problems began about 16 hours after Earthrace's journey began. The boat had just been refitted with a new kind of carbon propellers designed to increase efficiency and reduce vibration.
But Earthrace's speed and weight proved too much for the blades, which have deteriorated to a point Bethune called "staggering."
"All the blades have sections where the carbon is peeling away, and the entire leading edge of one blade is coming to bits," Bethune said after a night-time dive to inspect the damage.
After a more detailed inspection on Sunday, he told his ground crew that "sections the size of dollar bills are mission from the props."
