Dena Hankins's Blog, page 10

To Bermuda, Day 8

S/V SN-E Cetacea Log Day 8 – 78.6 NM

7/4/2023

James’ 12:30-1:00 pm watch: 

Drink more water, move around more and hallucinate less…if at all possible.

12:37 pm: So far, this day is shaping up as less perfect than yesterday. Less wind, and at an angle to the swell that pumps the sails. We have the motor engaged and feel fine about that.

Dena’s 9-midnight watch

9:11 pm: Okay, I was wrong. This afternoon turned into a perfect reach that’s still going now.

10:01 pm: The moon rose behind clouds for a spooky effect. I came this close to reefing the main from ambiance alone. We’re still reaching at 4 knots, though. Lovebot isn’t struggling to steer and there aren’t waves it would be dangerous to surf.

Just backlit clouds like windows to the void.

10:58 pm: A cool, wet breeze, F2, just took over from the brisk fresh F3. Now I get to wait and find out whether the rain will come to us or pass northeast like so many others from the southeast quadrant. Like the ships, they’re just faster than us.

7/5/2023

James’ 12-3am watch: 

Dena hands the tiller over with an offer to drive us the rest of the way between the 3 storm cells I wake up to…I hang tight for a minute or two and gently shoo her away to her bunk.

I should’ve reefed!

Fuck!!!

When the combined winds of the three cells hit I pulled in both headsails and fell off the wind riding a following gust on squared-up waves…

Dena’s 3-6 am watch

4:41 am: Must be the heat.

I just de-crossconnected the propulsion pack (which we haven’t had to use tonight) from the house battery, which had taken a beating. We were down 5% in just the 3 hours between 9 pm and midnight! When I opened the lazarette to retrieve the companionway hatch (we remove one for better visibility of the chartplotter), I noticed that it was really hot in there. 

The same space that’s home for the fridge. No wonder it had struggled to solidify the ice! 

We’ll have to keep an eye on that.

Anyway, I connected the systems for an hour and wow does the 48v pack have a salubrious effect on the 12v system! For 2% of the propulsion pack, I boosted House 2 by 7%. That’s not magic, it’s the difference between voltages.

Meanwhile, we’re rocking a hard reach. Lovebot is struggling a bit in the gusts so I’m tempted to reef, but I fully expect a visit from Dawn Windkiller within the next hour and then we’ll want that sail area.

To Bermuda, Day 7

S/V SN-E Cetacea Log Day 7 – 67 NM

7/3

James’ 1-2 pm watch: 

The sun is so overhead that I can shade my feet with my hat when I stand up in the cockpit.

…a fucking week, we’ve been underway for a week and our ocean is finally starting to thin out a bit from all that ship traffic.

1:04 pm: When the wind lightened up this morning, the current had turned in our favor and, since then, we still haven’t done much motor-engaging for a boost. It’s a pleasure to have a renewable chemistry rather than the finite diesel problem, but it’s still preferable to sail and bank this good daytime power. 

We’ve run all three banks lower than usual over the last few days. Hot weather means less efficiency from the solar panels and refrigerator plus more desire for fans and unending refills on the cold water. Still air means nothing from the wind generators.

The world, though! This area has a lot more action visible in the water…life and death as seen through splashes, some leaping fish, and the spreading ripples following the drama.

We’re still ringed by clouds in this high pressure zone. I’m not sad that the wind and current have us trending north. I think there’s more wind up there. We’ll see!

Dena’s 2-3 pm watch

2:45 pm: The winds are incredibly light. The waters of the world are in motion (there’s no such thing as static). The force of this patch is pushing us into the breathy sigh of hot atmosphere around us and keeping the sails remarkably full. Gusts are maybe what you’d feel at a brisk jog and they spin the boat onto a slightly more direct course before it eases and we fall off north again.

We’re using the 260 or so watts of solar power for the propulsion pack to support the house batteries in making water. We’ll just run it for an hour.

Dena’s 4-5 pm watch

4:50 pm: So…trash. I just watched a 20 ounce soda or water bottle go by, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen trash. Plenty of it is unrecognizable, but there was a lid for something sold in bulk and a buoy from a crab pot or some such thing. With so many ships passing, even accidentally dropped things wouldn’t be surprising, but that’s probably not the bulk of it.

James’ 5-6 pm watch: 

The sun does its solar thing…the moon, wow, does its full moon thing and all the stars save the hardiest few slither away from the light as if they were billions of miles away.

5:08 pm: Excellent dinner. It’s been hard to want to cook in this heat. We’ve even been doing canned soup cold. Black beans and yellow rice, though…what a treat! 

And now we have leftovers for two more meals. 

James’ 9-midnight watch: 

This moon is doing a bang up job illuminating the storm cells for me…not a single drop hit us for my entire watch.

Rain that comes at us from abaft at 8 knots and dies away before it reaches the companionway hatch…I like this rain.

Dena’s midnight-3 am watch

2:17 am: I’m trying not to do too much math with the excellent progress we’re making. There’s no such thing as “if we keep going at this pace”!

What I look like:

What I’m looking at:

F3 is my favorite. We’re going 3.0-3.5 knots, the ride is pretty easy for a beat, and there’s some power coming in from the wind generator. It’s a good night after a good day.

James’ 3-6 am watch: 

I never even touched the rig.

…to conserve power we have started running at night dark. Meaning: running lights off until we get within visual distance of an AIS signature then we kick them on.

Well, at about 4:30 am I got an AIS reading that was about 2.5 miles out…well within visual range…I hit our running lights and a moment later a 400ft chemical tanker blinked into existence a couple of miles off our port bow. Huh…

After they were well behind us I shut our running lights off again and a moment later the ship disappeared once again into the darkness…their AIS signature was still up on the chartplotter…but they were all but invisible to the naked eye even with a totally full moon…A 400 Foot Ship? In the middle of the ocean…gone?!

Dena’s 6-9 am watch

6:17 am: Holy shit what a beautiful sunrise!

This is worth getting up for.

Also, the wind just died in that special Dawn Windkiller way (lead singer in what band?) but less completely than a couple days ago.

…and then rose again! Sweet!

8:49 am: This is the opposite of what we’ve experienced in tradewinds. Wow. It’ll be blowing F3 and then die out to almost nothing. Just when I give up and course-correct, it comes back. I mean, it’s not like I have something better to do than tend our course, but it’s the expectant moments that feel silly. It’s like a soap opera…will it, won’t it? Should I, should I not?

To Bermuda, Day 6

S/V SN-E Cetacea Log Day 6 – 47 NM

7/2

James’ 12:30-1 pm watch

When noon came around, a tanker was passing us less than a mile away. Safe enough but what’s up with all the traffic? Worlds away from seeing only 4 vessels in 20 days on our way to Hawaii.

…but, they do seem to be thinning out a bit.

Dena’s 3-4 pm watch

3:55 pm: The water is sapphire quicksilver, undappled by the slightest breeze. Has been since before noon. We’re barely motoring a knot to conserve power, just making enough way to have helm. The beauty around us is outsized, our empty horizon implying the whole rest of the World Ocean. Our slow-rolling propeller and whale-family hull barely change the epic wrinkles passing through the water, through us. We leave behind a pacifist’s roil and ripples that disappear as though glad to become part of the larger energy. 

We made water for an hour today to keep the membranes fresh. We’re a bit low in both house banks, so we can cross-connected the propulsion pack as well. Boom! It ate 2% of the propulsion pack but boosted the house banks several.

James’ 4-5 pm watch: The Free Ride…motorsailing on glass making enough power to motorsail on glass…

Waiting for the Earth to forgive us with her winds.

4:05 pm: She came through once again.

Dena’s 7-8 pm watch

7:55 pm: Sailing! James got the beginning of it on his 6-7 shift. I shook the first reef and put the staysail out. I want to leverage the wind a little more thoroughly if we’re only going to have it between 7 pm and 5 am! 

For most of the time the motor was engaged, we offset the power draw with solar to one degree or another. A solid 4 hours, it was a wash because of how slow we were running it, about 450-500 rpm.

Now, time to rest my eyes before my first long watch starts at 9 pm.

Dena’s 9-midnight watch

9:14 pm: It’s so rare to get a reasonable picture of the moon with a cell phone from a moving sailboat, but this cloud helped.

10:59 pm: The seas are starting to respond to the wind, so the ride is bit more exciting than it has been. We’re only making 3.5-4.0, but it feels like 4.5-5.0. That sounds about right considering the doldrum motoring has been at least 1 knot slower than we expect at those revs.

Sure would be nice to have access to updated weather forecasts and current patterns. With all the dead daytime air, we discussed whether we should head north and try to find the wind line we had been aiming for. The upshot of that discussion was basically a shrug, since we don’t have any information to help us figure it out.

Dena’s 3-6 am watch

5:33 am: Morning.

To Bermuda, Day 5

S/V SN-E Cetacea Log Day 5 – 43 NM

7/1 

James’ noon-12:30 pm watch

12:18 pm: Glass again, or still. 

We’re looking at the eventual possibility of running low enough on the propulsion pack to let the currents take us for a while. Meantime, we’re using about half our power to stay on course against a north-setting current and the rest to achieve a blistering 0.5 knots.

It’s hot and sunny right now. Not perfectly comfortable but sweaty-fine as long as we stay hydrated. Then there’s icing the hot, steamy panting cat.

James’ 1-2 pm watch

A blue so blue it defines its own depth.

1:09 pm: My (Dena’s) phone said it was getting hot so I stopped doing my log while up above decks. Basically, I was just going to say that our previous 24-hour distance total was the shortest so far. Perhaps even the shortest ever for any boat we’ve been on. Electric propulsion is both everything we’d hoped for and the limiting factor that we were expecting.

James’ 3-4 pm watch

The silence is almost perfect except for the wash sound of the slow prop.

3:03 pm: I (Dena) recline on the port settee in a position that’s starting to get old. Our unusual watch schedule, with these short 1-hour day watches, is especially good on a day like today. 

A long quiet sailing watch is a planet-awareness trance when I’m lucky; it’s a grinding bore when I’m not. Values of  lucky include how fatigued or restless I am, whether Lovebot is driving well, what the light of the sun or moon or stars is doing in the water and against the clouds, how much I have to brace my body against unwanted motion, whether I am fussing all stuck in my own head or open to my surroundings, how sounds are hitting my ears, even how my clothes are fitting and my general physical state.

Playing the wind and motor game in near doldrums is rather diverting, actually. 

Light, fluky winds require some attentiveness without the high stakes of strong wind. I can leave Lovebot set up even if I know there’s not enough force to move it because I can use it like a tiller tamer. Put the tiller where I want it and leave it there until a wave or light gust push us off course, move it, redo. An adjustment every few minutes, more often when the swell is more awkward.

And then I shift-kiss James, strip my protective long-sleeved shirt and churidar pants, and lie down naked to read under a fan.

Even if this trip ends up taking the weeks, I want to remember that this is the best thing I could be doing right now. There’s nothing else I ought to be achieving, nowhere else I ought to be focusing on. This is the journey as destination.

Dena’s 8-9 pm watch 

8:16 pm: My last watch before tomorrow is glorious so far. Gently sailing, making a little wind power while watching the sunset and letting Lovebot drive. We’re still only going 2.0-3.0 knots but that’s so much faster than 0.5-1.0. Seriously so much faster.

If I fall overboard, you take my ship and you come back and get me.

The air is cooling more quickly in the evenings and the predawn shift was cool enough this morning that I wore my flannel. No complaints. I also did a light rain shift in the cockpit nude because it felt good and I didn’t want to have to dry my clothes. Hip hip hurray for getting out of Florida! 

It’s picking up instead of dying down. I hope we’ve left the doldrums, but this has happened briefly before. No storm cells around this time, so maybe it’s not a local effect? Please!

7/2

Dena’s midnight-3 am watch 

12:41 am: I’m indulgently amused at my attentiveness to every lull and gust. We’re still sailing under single-reefed main, staysail, and yankee, still seeing mostly 2-3 knots. 

Shaking that last reef would make the lulls just that much more painful, the increased sail area more apt to frap. Plus, these 3 knot moments are already all the excitement I want.

But when we drop under a knot, I clutch at my calm. Will it won’t it come back?

So far, so good.

Dena’s 6-9 am watch 

6:46 am: James had no better luck keeping us on track. We both couldn’t stand to give up such good speed, so we made about 3 out-of-the-way miles along with the 10 in the right direction. Racing sailors are more used to thinking about immediate VMG (velocity made good, meaning progress towards your destination even if tacking back and forth around the straight line). We take the long view, if you’ll forgive the obviousness of that statement.

In other news, we got a morning visit from a pair of white-tailed tropicbirds. They’re known to nest in Bermuda so that feels good. They seem to have been attracted to the asymmetrical spinnaker since they circled the boat, keeking their little hearts out, after I got it flying.

I figure the asym is worth a try. With a bit of roll and heave to the actually quite gentle seas, it gets shaken empty frequently. I do think I’m getting nearly a knot from it, though, and that’s enough to keep the motor disengaged.

Also, we’re going so slowly that I changed the Simrad’s track logging from 1 nautical mile to 0.25 nautical mile intervals. 

The course we’re on keeps us pretty oblique to the sun except when it’s very high, and then as the sun lowers the upper port solar panel shade the lower. Exasperation. This is THE course for Bermuda, no hope that the sun’s going to change vector in time for it to get better…I mean, even our great stores of food won’t last until winter.

James’ 9-10 am watch: 

It gets hot really early now with very little reprieve from the wind throughout the heat. The southwesterlies do come up though and are even starting to take us well into the night.

9:04 am: We’re bucking a current from the east. My (Dena’s) evidence is that both the southerly and the northerly tacks have us going significantly upwind (!) of our heading. Usually the wind pushes your course over ground downwind. If we were beating, that would be great…it would be more direct and we’d make more progress towards our destination.

Instead, when we gybed and turned only 120° through the wind, our course over ground changed a full 180°. Ugh. That means that what I thought was the bad tack was actually the good tack. 

Did I realize that before I set up the asym? Nope, no, I didn’t.

I got to practice both setting up and gybing that thing while James slept on his 6-9 down watch this morning. It was fine, almost easy, but rather sweaty.

Fk. Lauderdale again?!

You know, three weeks ago when we finished the propulsion project we were so ahead of the storms that it was totally comical. The wind rose from the southeast every day and broad-reached us all the way through the lower Florida Keys like a leaf on the water. But we quickly realized we were having charging issues with our propulsion wind generator… meaning, we had to get the battery down below 50% before it would even start charging and the controller wouldn’t accept Dena’s battery parameters.

The motor itself worked well.

By the time we got to Key Biscayne the propulsion pack was hovering around the 51% level and getting only a solar charge. The wind generator was throttling itself back because it thought our battery bank was full.

$2,800 US (fucking!) bucks for something that didn’t work was totally unacceptable!

We (I [James] am sorry, Dena) emailed and called the manufacturer over and over but they just wouldn’t believe that she was programming the charge controller correctly. I (Dena) pasted screenshots of the entire process into multiple emails, including the computer saying I had the most up to date drivers and all the minutiae of “it must be your computer”. They tried to reproduce our issues in their lab and couldn’t get our fucked-up results, so it had to be our fault.

When I (still Dena) finally went shaking-with-anger voice on the tech support person and insisted that it had to be hardware and that they had to…HAD TO…send us a replacement controller and computer interface lead (dongle) express international service we’ve-been-doing-this-for-weeks the-time-to-save-money-on-shipping-was-two-weeks-ago OR ELSE! Well. She said she’d have her boss call us as soon as he returned to his office from downstairs or whatever. Instead, she is the one who called back and explained that yes, they would get the replacement shipped same day. Friday.

We did the trip between where we were Friday (Tavernier) and where the shipment was going (Fk. Lauderdale) in a couple of stages, the stormiest of which we already wrote about.

International shipping isn’t guaranteed to be as fast as domestic, so the TNT/FedEx handover created a day’s delay. On Tuesday, the package arrived at the local Marlec reseller, eMarine Services, a company we’ve ordered from before. We invested in a ride to their offices, where the guy in charge (a totally awesome man named Alex) let us try to program the replacement controller with their power supply and laptop.

The thing they didn’t send? The computer interface dongle.

It didn’t work. The engineer wouldn’t be in for a couple hours.

Bathed in frustration and sweat from the heat and humidity, we paid for the ride back to the dinghy without either controller and without the dongle and without an answer.

Our Lake Sylvia

The engineer discovered that our charge controller and the special add-on computer interface dongle were both malfunctioning in two totally different ways. We did another set of paid-rides to their offices and left with their very own programming dongle (mwah-haha).

Don’t get me wrong, that was really sweet vindication, absolutely the best, but we had been forced to sail through a second terrifying lightning storm to score the new gear.

The one that missed us

We didn’t get hit by lighting between Key Biscyane and Fk. Lauderdale (which was a plus), we proved that we can negotiate a three-mile entrance channel and reach a safe anchorage with the combination of wind-in-the-sails and juice-to-the-motor, and we got our new charge controller and dongle so now it works perfectly.

At least there was a row!

…just in time for T/S Cindy to come rolling along our projected course to Bermuda.

Bollucks!!!

The proving grounds

…and then we went sailing!

This is what I (James) look like sailing!

Marathon was such a fucking drag in the end that we couldn’t help but laugh on our way out of there. We’d been in that place and interacting with that community of workers and boaters for about six weeks and we were fleeing that buggy heat like the environmental refugees we are.

Just because we were ready doesn’t mean the boat was

The tiller project was wrapped up with the intention of completing it in some anchorage between here and…well..there, wherever that was. The point is, we had to get underway so we did.

We sailed off the hook from the outside Boot Key anchorage with very little assistance from the electric propulsion. We were breaking the new propulsion system in so we left it on throughout the day in all the conditions.

…and the tiller pilot performed like a champ!

It took us about six and a half hours to reach (precise data available on our Patreon page) and go hook-down off Craig Key. When we left there, we had an unusually pleasurable tacking beat out to Hawk Channel with a little bit of motor assist to keep speed up during the tacks. Tavernier Key is the neighbor to our previously visited Rodriguez Key, so we stopped there for a fresh view after about the same amount of time.

We spent a couple days on projects…

…happy place!

…and struggling to get Marlec to do the right thing, but the views were satisfyingly beautiful.

The sunset in a different place is just a little better somehow

We even cut that long hippy hair we’d both grown!

Mohawks rule!

When we left there, we spent just under 6 hours getting to a quiet-ish spot off Key Largo’s Crocodile Lake.

…and S/V SN-E Cetacea sailed herself

As much as we wanted to test the motor system and run the battery pack down, the outrageous heat (over 90F with a feels-like of about 105F) boosted the propulsion bay to over 36C. We started getting the high-temp warning from the propulsion monitor and swapped the little auxiliary motor for the big-ass asymmetrical spinnaker.

Yeah motherfuckers!

We gybed it twice, but what’s a little labor on an easygoing day like that?

A storm broke over us that night and we woke beam-to the wind. That meant we were dragging! We got the electronics going and prepped for motoring into the wind or hauling anchor altogether, but the anchor caught a sand patch and held 0.2 nautical miles to lee. The next morning, the polished tip of the anchor bore witness to the fact that we must have snagged a rock when we first thought the anchor was well buried.

So off we went, gently motorsailing in nearly no wind. We were forecasted (Liars, Liars!) for some much stronger breezes in the afternoon, but what actually happened was far outside our expectations.

Remember, June is storm season in Florida…or rather…June is lighting season in Florida!

We pointed the boat at the Key Biscayne outside anchorage with a possible run all the way to Fk. Lauderdale if the downwind progress was all that.

Instead, the sky got angry, the sails got short and the cat disappeared into the forecastle.

The storm cells were piling up around us just about the time we lost internet completely. I (James) was below chill’n in the skivies when Dena opened the companionway with a, “We have way too much sail up. We gotta get this mainsail down right now!”

My reply, “Reefed or down?”

“Down!”

By that time, the thunder was less than ten seconds from the flash.

So out on the foredeck I went in my underwear to pull down the mainsail in a lightning storm. What?!

…there will be no more photos for a while.

I (Dena) huffed in annoyance at the third time a piercing digital sound broke the air. Yes, Sector Miami, I know, NOAA wants us all to pay attention. NOAA, I love you thank you you’re awesome I am only happy about taxes because of things like you shut the fuck up. How many times do you think you need to pull my attention to the “possible waterspouts capable of overturning boats” and winds in excess of 30 knots? I’m already heading immediately to safe harbor as you keep expressing I ought.

And even without the mainsail, I’m doing a spanking 3.8 knots. A little staysail and a little motor and a lot of nature’s own wind and waves kept us flogging north up Hawk Channel. When James’ shift came, he took over and played the wind and waves like a conductor. More staysail! Less staysail! Sheet out! It even self-gybed but was sheeted in such a way that it just kept on providing the directional stability to keep us from wallowing in those massive waves. The maestro engaged and disengaged the motor as the wind stalled between storm cells and then roared back into existence while the gap between lightning and thunder got real, real short.

I (James) said out loud to myself in the din, “don’t touch anything metal”. I looked at Dena and she was holding on to the wooden caprails in the cockpit. I held the tiller with both hands as if it was my only lifeline left.

Then pop! Spark! Something electric happened between James’ chest and mine (Dena’s), right over the tiller between us. James looked at me and I looked at him. I can confirm that his expression is much like how he describes mine. Open-mouthed shock. We both looked at the Simrad and holy shit it was totally fine. The motor monitor, also fine. The VHF, fine. Then the rain descended like a machine gun from abaft with the sound of the world and all her anger chasing us into the gray darkness.

Did we just get hit by the lightning of some globular atmospheric localized type? Did we and our our very expensive tech not only live but get to continue on without any damage whatsoever?

Yeah. I think we did.

Oh shit, now we have to continue on!

Now, a little background. One of the valid concerns about an all-electric boat is lightning strikes disabling every single system in a nano-second. We have chosen not bonding the boat before and have gone the same way with this boat. That means instead of webbing the boat with green wire to dissipate damaging stray electrical currents, we stay out of marinas with bad wiring and isolate every through-hull and internal system that doesn’t need to be looped into a single negative circuit.

I do believe that we have chosen correctly. I mean, it could be that a storm-down mast strike would still incapacitate us but, at least in that charged moment, our boat became supercharged and then discharged its load harmlessly between the hearts of the two humans aboard and the ocean below.

I have no idea what Beluga Greyfinger experienced. What wouldn’t I give to know?!?

After that, we sailed another hour of freaked-out storm reality to the southern tip of Key Biscayne, Cape Florida. Just before we passed the lighthouse, I took the helm from James. We prepped for anchoring and made it happen. We did all our usual post-anchoring things but…whoa. It took us more than the usual number of hours to come down off the excitement of getting struck by lightning and not dying and all but the sleep after that? That’s the sleep of a sailor, that’s Supersleep. G’night!

The Invisible Amount of Money

The slow circumnavigation of a 30′ electric sailboat holds a real excitement for people, especially since we can’t find any other sailboats who have done it or are ahead of us. We’ve gone ahead and started a Patreon account where you can cheer us on and be part of proving that electric propulsion is a viable part of the sailor’s future.

We’re asking for financial support to help us make this voyage happen. You can help us sail and motor around the world without buying or burning diesel for propulsion. Huzzah! Ditching diesel is a huge step, and our environmental and practical reasons for going electric are covered on this blog and in our Patreon posts, so dig in to past posts and stay tuned for more.

What is an invisible amount of money? For one of our friends, it is $10. She’s giving us that each month and we will use it gratefully for bread in the Azores. Another has pledged $15, which will keep Beluga Greyfinger happily fed. A former customer turned friend and a complete stranger have each decided that $5 is what they can easily provide…great gifts! And a very old friend and connection, with more resources at his disposal than most, has signed up to drop $100 on us each month.

Some people know exactly where every dime goes every month because there are never enough of them to cover all their needs. We aren’t asking for that money. It’s the $10, $20, $50, $100…hell, we’ll be thrilled if someone is willing to sign up at $500…that isn’t budgeted for anything else, that won’t create discomfort in life or discord in marriage (ha!), yes, please.

We’ve set off on this electric sailboat circumnavigation with the thrill and care we bring to all our voyages. Help us make an enduring reality out of this current excitement.

Our Patreon posts are, so far, a combination of day-in-the-life and the nitty gritty details of first converting this 40-year-old boat from a diesel to an electric auxiliary and now testing it out. Because we’re us, we’re not locking our posts on Patreon. We want to encourage all sailors to join this new club of electric travelers and hard data is scarce. By the time we’ve gone around the world, we will have posted years of information like this last one:

“After 6 hours and 22 minutes, we’d gone 23.7 NM at an average of 3.78 knots and used 25% (57 Ah) of our capacity. The solar logged 710 Wh while underway in partly cloudy conditions. We had F2-F3 winds on the starboard beam and a mild swell. We left Marathon and arrived at the Channel Five bridge both with mild favorable currents.”

We’ve built an amazing data collection facility on S/V SN-E Cetacea and, if you know us, you know we’re serious about our proofs. Over the last year we proved to each other once again that we that we genuinely prefer to sail when at all possible…and that means everywhere. And to prove that, we’re going to go everywhere we can go on this planet in this tiny electric sailboat and we sure could use your help. Our Patreon account.

Come on, Marlec

So, of all the new technologies we’ve gotten to know and the new battery chemistry and the new…well…everything propulsion and steering that isn’t our sailing rig, the only one to cause us enduring frustration has been the 48v Rutland 1200 windcharger (the British way of saying wind generator, it seems).

They fairly recently got on board the high voltage train with a 48v version of the 12v wind generator we already own (see last year’s installation). They only about a year ago got some kind of support for the LiFePO4 batteries that are powering modern electric sailboats.

And their shit is not working.

We paid extra for a standard-phone-plug-to-USB cable and PC app that was supposed to let us change the charge parameters so that they’d work with our lithium phosphate battery pack. Instead, this program let me change some parameters and save the changes…it said the controller had received them…but when I disconnected and reconnected, it had all gone back to the defaults.

Why is this a problem? Well, their “return to bulk” setting (also not standard terminology as far as I can tell) is so low that we would have to nearly kill the battery before the controller would take the wind generator off standby.

Now we’re dealing with a company that’s about 3000 miles away and not jumping to fix this problem for us. We’re heading their direction but, believe me, carrying this broken system back to them for fixing is not exactly Plan A. Here’s hoping they fix us up in the next couple-few days so that we can keep our new electric motor running in the fashion to which we’d like to become accustomed.

S/V SN-E

So here’s a story…

A couple of people go to sea for a couple of decades and discover a world dominated by the infernal combustion of one single industry. From construction to motivation, the entire marine industry is designed to consume massive amounts of products mined from a single source: petroleum. Everything. I’m talking epoxy, varnish, paint, foam for the settee cushions, gas for the outboards and the gensets, and ultimately millions upon millions of gallons of fuel to shift millions of vessels over the world’s ocean and all the waterways of every country around the globe.

And that shit’s finite, as is our breathable atmosphere.

What if those two aforementioned people wandering the sea (yeah us, James and Dena) discovered along the way that it didn’t have to be all that? Maybe we could curb that usage for ourselves and show people that there is a way to discover an entire planet without using a single drop of fuel.

Oh, sorry, that’s already been done thousands of times throughout history!

But what hasn’t been done, as far as I (James) can tell, is two people and a very cool gato circumnavigating the Earth in a 29.7 foot/9.05 meter electric sailboat.

We’re going to give it a shot!

Not us.

So there we were in Key West, right about my birthday, dedicating ourselves to getting rid of the diesel motor and all its related toxicity. We decided to try a local media blitz by putting it all up for sale in every market we sailed to until we sold it. By the time we made landfall back in Marathon and changed the location on all the ads, we’d had a couple bites that got us excited. The next few weeks, we rolled though a disappointing gauntlet of flakes like the ones that have had us running from so many ports in the past. We were really dedicated and thoroughly invested in never buying another drop of marine diesel fuel. We’d even put the orders in for the big ticket items we’d need, but we couldn’t actually move forward on the application until we got rid of that evil engine.

1.8 kilowatts of awesomeness!

While we continued to get bites and disappointments from prospective buyers, we built the smallest 1.8kw wind and solar farm we’ve ever seen and planned a way to take the engine apart piece by piece and deposit the detritus in every recycling bin from Vaca Key to Key Largo. Then the unexpected happened: we actually sold that 40 year old nightmare for the same amount we paid for our really cool dinghy.

Captain Dena with her pimp’n rides

Don’t get me wrong, we were totally taken by the local mooring-mafia but we were on the verge of giving that shit away to a dumpster so…yay.

Before, all cleaned up for the ad photo

Dena and I, of course, had to do all the fucking nasty work to disconnect that piece of shit from our bilge (I even had to winch that monster out of the boat and over the side) but in the end we totally aborted that mess and that’s no easy task in Florida, let me tell you.

When it was gone, we jettisoned the diesel fuel tank and had a whole set of messes to clean.

The old tank space

But the soon-to-be propulsion bay took the cake.

Gag-a-fucking-maggot

Making so much weight disappear gave us a startling sight from the dinghy. The boat was angled up at the stern! I mean, enough that the fried eggs ran down the cast iron toward the bow. We’d added wind and solar aft, but it gave us something to think about.

It was hot and sticky already, and promising to get worse through May. There was just something so satisfying about having all those LiFePO4 cells aboard, though! The system was getting real.

…mine!

All this truly excellent gear sat for a sphincter-loosening amount of time at the marina’s receiving area, and eventually we decided it was better to live with it on our settees than leave it up there in public. That meant schlepping it to Tursiops, loading it into Tursiops, rowing Tursiops to Cetacea, heaving it up onto deck, and then getting it below. The weight was significant to us, but it didn’t fix the stern-up trim problem. Not even a little!

Beluga didn’t mind so much

Back to the mess, we had hoped the oil catching basin would just lift out, but it was fiberglassed in. We cut an access port and began excavating the gifts from previous owners.

https://flic.kr/p/2oBCVDL…my buddy

We worked like we thought we could and would, taking turns with the cold water and fans, and what we got was a near perfect propulsion bay.

Propulsion Bay underway

Every step of the way we were unloading hundreds of pounds of obsolete Yanmar gear back into the boating community of Boot Key via the local magical dumpster. Just put something on the flat part on the back and it magically disappears. It’s absolutely the best thing about this place. Nothing goes to waste. A couple weeks into the project, we watched a pretty little sailboat die right in front of us after being flooded by a storm. I’d bet that everything on that boat that can be absorbed back into Boot Key Harbor will be or already has been.

We installed an electric motor to our drive shaft after…Motherfucker!

But we got a cool new 12v power tool – the Milwaukee cut-off tool did the job

By the way, this entire project took place on a mooring, without a generator. We used 12v battery powered tools for everything we didn’t use hand tools for, and we rotated those batteries on the chargers as assiduously as we do anything.

Dena shot this bent in two while adjusting the packing gland

We were both designing the space as we went. I mean, Dena designed the entire propulsion system on paper weeks ago and built the entire budget over the last year of cruising but the actual application part was an engineering marvel.

At first, we’d planned on putting the propulsion (LiFePo4) battery bank forward of the propulsion bay in the old diesel tank compartment. There was plenty of room for the bank and all of its freaked out electrical elements in there and we kind of thought we would have to open it that much which made it good if we couldn’t get the diesel smell out. But not only did we get the smell completely out of the boat we also did some new measurements with the motor in place and discovered the entire LiFePo4 bank would fit in with the motor…and I mean, like a glove!

Discharge of oil (strictly) prohibited!!!

I (James) have always admired from a great distance the philosophy of “do it once right”. It’s great to have goals…it really is, but I also like to go sailing on my boat and really the 20ft rule works for me.

Anyway, we absolutely had to get this one right and we did!!! Once!

We fiberglassed and bolted the solid oak stringers into place, we lined everything up to flow with the existing lines, we built and ran every single cable and wire from the charging sources to the battery terminals, we plugged everything in and and I’ll be fucked by a jesuit, it all worked!

I mean, almost. After figuring out that the battery system’s BMS had to be jump-started by some kind of power. The only kind we had was run through controllers that strictly require battery connection FIRST, so we raw-wired the solar to the thing and bing! It’s alive! All of it! It took both of us switching between Propulsion Bay and sitting in front of the fans all that last day of Memorial Day weekend to align it right but we did and made a proof-of-concept run against the mooring ball pennant.

…and then we took her for a spin!

…hear that?!

We’re starting on a new type of voyage, where we’re going to be held to our ethics more closely than ever before. Sail when ever possible, check. Plan ahead to avoid contrary currents and winds, check. Be ready to stay in an anchorage a little longer than planned just in case, check.

Lots of people talk about range anxiety as the reason they can’t go electric on their boats. We’re setting off to demonstrate that, just like we’ve always said about moving aboard, it’s not about bringing your big-ass life down to the water, it’s about fitting into the boat that fits you. Now, the boat has no explosion-based propulsion that rattles fasteners loose and freaks out us and the cat, so fitting into the boat also means patience and planning.

Doesn’t that sound like the sailor’s story to you?

S/V S.N-E

So here’s a story…

A couple of people go to sea for a couple of decades and discover a world dominated by the infernal combustion of one single industry. From construction to motivation, the entire marine industry is designed to consume massive amounts of products mined from a single source: petroleum. Everything. I’m talking epoxy, varnish, paint, foam for the settee cushions, gas for the outboards and the gensets, and ultimately millions upon millions of gallons of fuel to shift millions of vessels over the world’s ocean and all the waterways of every country around the globe.

And that shit’s finite, as is our breathable atmosphere.

What if those two aforementioned people wandering the sea (yeah us, James and Dena) discovered along the way that it didn’t have to be all that? Maybe we could curb that usage for ourselves and show people that there is a way to discover an entire planet without using a single drop of fuel.

Oh, sorry, that’s already been done thousands of times throughout history!

But what hasn’t been done, as far as I (James) can tell, is two people and a very cool gato circumnavigating the Earth in a 29.7 foot/9.05 meter electric sailboat.

We’re going to give it a shot!

Not us.

So there we were in Key West, right about my birthday, dedicating ourselves to getting rid of the diesel motor and all its related toxicity. We decided to try a local media blitz by putting it all up for sale in every market we sailed to until we sold it. By the time we made landfall back in Marathon and changed the location on all the ads, we’d had a couple bites that got us excited. The next few weeks, we rolled though a disappointing gauntlet of flakes like the ones that have had us running from so many ports in the past. We were really dedicated and thoroughly invested in never buying another drop of marine diesel fuel. We’d even put the orders in for the big ticket items we’d need, but we couldn’t actually move forward on the application until we got rid of that evil engine.

1.8 kilowatts of awesomeness!

While we continued to get bites and disappointments from prospective buyers, we built the smallest 1.8kw wind and solar farm we’ve ever seen and planned a way to take the engine apart piece by piece and deposit the detritus in every recycling bin from Vaca Key to Key Largo. Then the unexpected happened: we actually sold that 40 year old nightmare for the same amount we paid for our really cool dinghy.

Captain Dena with her pimp’n rides

Don’t get me wrong, we were totally taken by the local mooring-mafia but we were on the verge of giving that shit away to a dumpster so…yay.

Before, all cleaned up for the ad photo

Dena and I, of course, had to do all the fucking nasty work to disconnect that piece of shit from our bilge (I even had to winch that monster out of the boat and over the side) but in the end we totally aborted that mess and that’s no easy task in Florida, let me tell you.

When it was gone, we jettisoned the diesel fuel tank and had a whole set of messes to clean.

The old tank space

But the soon-to-be propulsion bay took the cake.

Gag-a-fucking-maggot

Making so much weight disappear gave us a startling sight from the dinghy. The boat was angled up at the stern! I mean, enough that the fried eggs ran down the cast iron toward the bow. We’d added wind and solar aft, but it gave us something to think about.

It was hot and sticky already, and promising to get worse through May. There was just something so satisfying about having all those LiFePO4 cells aboard, though! The system was getting real.

…mine!

All this truly excellent gear sat for a sphincter-loosening amount of time at the marina’s receiving area, and eventually we decided it was better to live with it on our settees than leave it up there in public. That meant schlepping it to Tursiops, loading it into Tursiops, rowing Tursiops to Cetacea, heaving it up onto deck, and then getting it below. The weight was significant to us, but it didn’t fix the stern-up trim problem. Not even a little!

Beluga didn’t mind so much

Back to the mess, we had hoped the oil catching basin would just lift out, but it was fiberglassed in. We cut an access port and began excavating the gifts from previous owners.

https://flic.kr/p/2oBCVDL…my buddy

We worked like we thought we could and would, taking turns with the cold water and fans, and what we got was a near perfect propulsion bay.

Propulsion Bay underway

Every step of the way we were unloading hundreds of pounds of obsolete Yanmar gear back into the boating community of Boot Key via the local magical dumpster. Just put something on the flat part on the back and it magically disappears. It’s absolutely the best thing about this place. Nothing goes to waste. A couple weeks into the project, we watched a pretty little sailboat die right in front of us after being flooded by a storm. I’d bet that everything on that boat that can be absorbed back into Boot Key Harbor will be or already has been.

We installed an electric motor to our drive shaft after…Motherfucker!

But we got a cool new 12v power tool – the Milwaukee cut-off tool did the job

By the way, this entire project took place on a mooring, without a generator. We used 12v battery powered tools for everything we didn’t use hand tools for, and we rotated those batteries on the chargers as assiduously as we do anything.

Dena shot this bent in two while adjusting the packing gland

We were both designing the space as we went. I mean, Dena designed the entire propulsion system on paper weeks ago and built the entire budget over the last year of cruising but the actual application part was an engineering marvel.

At first, we’d planned on putting the propulsion (LiFePo4) battery bank forward of the propulsion bay in the old diesel tank compartment. There was plenty of room for the bank and all of its freaked out electrical elements in there and we kind of thought we would have to open it that much which made it good if we couldn’t get the diesel smell out. But not only did we get the smell completely out of the boat we also did some new measurements with the motor in place and discovered the entire LiFePo4 bank would fit in with the motor…and I mean, like a glove!

Discharge of oil (strictly) prohibited!!!

I (James) have always admired from a great distance the philosophy of “do it once right”. It’s great to have goals…it really is, but I also like to go sailing on my boat and really the 20ft rule works for me.

Anyway, we absolutely had to get this one right and we did!!! Once!

We fiberglassed and bolted the solid oak stringers into place, we lined everything up to flow with the existing lines, we built and ran every single cable and wire from the charging sources to the battery terminals, we plugged everything in and and I’ll be fucked by a jesuit, it all worked!

I mean, almost. After figuring out that the battery system’s BMS had to be jump-started by some kind of power. The only kind we had was run through controllers that strictly require battery connection FIRST, so we raw-wired the solar to the thing and bing! It’s alive! All of it! It took both of us switching between Propulsion Bay and sitting in front of the fans all that last day of Memorial Day weekend to align it right but we did and made a proof-of-concept run against the mooring ball pennant.

…and then we took her for a spin!

…hear that?!

We’re starting on a new type of voyage, where we’re going to be held to our ethics more closely than ever before. Sail when ever possible, check. Plan ahead to avoid contrary currents and winds, check. Be ready to stay in an anchorage a little longer than planned just in case, check.

Lots of people talk about range anxiety as the reason they can’t go electric on their boats. We’re setting off to demonstrate that, just like we’ve always said about moving aboard, it’s not about bringing your big-ass life down to the water, it’s about fitting into the boat that fits you. Now, the boat has no explosion-based propulsion that rattles fasteners loose and freaks out us and the cat, so fitting into the boat also means patience and planning.

Doesn’t that sound like the sailor’s story to you?