Electrified – Page 4 – Sovereign Nations

To Azores Day 4

July 29, 2023 Dena Electrified, Sailing Logs

Friday, July 28 Noontime watch: we split the 12:00 hour into two 30 minute “workout” watches. It gives us an odd switch over so we don’t get stuck with the same dog-watches every night. It’s working out. I (James) started my new sci-fi novel today…it feels so good to be finally putting this work down. I’ve had it in my head for two decades and now it’s going on the page as if I already know the story…I do I guess…until I don’t. There seems to be a weather formation coming up from the west and it is making its presence known in the form of wind fluctuations from abaft…very light and teasing. Dena’s 1-4pm watch 2:03 pm: We’re not really seeing the steadying up of the wind that the forecast (from the morning we left) said we’d see. We’re motorsailing a little under break-even, meaning we’re still adding power to the battery even though we’re also using the motor. We’re only getting about a knot from it but with that bit of wind we have, we’re moving between 2 and 3 knots. And so we go. Dena’s 5-6pm watch 5:49 pm: It’s frustrating to slat the main as much as we have. When the light wind was forward of or just off the beam, we just went slow. Like this, though…I can see stretch marks on the sail where it bends around the shrouds. Not great. I just gybed again, back to a port tack. It’s the third gybe of the day and all in a very short period of time. It’s because we’re trying to go so far downwind in part but mostly because the swell and wind and current make it complicated to figure out the best course. Most direct isn’t always it, but I don’t think[…]

To Azores Day 3

July 28, 2023 Dena Electrified, Sailing Logs

Thursday, July 27 At midday’s 8 bells we had 1666nm before us to Horta… We’ve switched up the watch schedule to include a 3 hour private time for each of us every other day…I’m thrilled but so far it’s been during the hottest hours of the day 1-4pm. Man is it hot today! The Windy forecast we recorded before taking off from Bermuda was spot on for the previous days on this leg…once again, we’re only three days out…it’s hard nailing it ten days out…we’ll soon see how accurate they’ve gotten over the years. Dena’s 4-5 pm watch 4:18 pm: My first long day watch wasn’t a spectacular success in the writing realm. The best writing I’m doing lately is right here! I spent about an hour going over the synopsis and some of the notes for my partial manuscript, Shriving, and then reading the first two scenes. Without going into exhaustive detail, it needs work. Then I bedded down for a long nap! We’ve only completed two days underway, so it’s not strange that my body wants to use any opportunity to sleep. The broken sleep pattern of a watch system takes a little while to get used to. Plus, it’s not that easy to keep track of how much sleep I’m even getting when so much of it is in snatches. Now I feel really refreshed. Sitting here, it just struck me. The waves are made up quite a few colors and qualities of light. This mid-afternoon angle, looking south, one of the common colors, under the little wavelet peaks, is the blue of James’s eyes. Just a hint of green and with a glow that is from depth rather than surface sheen. Neat. He really fits in out here. James’ 5-6 pm watch: Dressing the boat down[…]

To Azores Day 2

July 27, 2023 Dena Boat Projects, Electrified, Sailing Logs

Wednesday, July 26 Dena’s 12:30-1 pm watch: The sun, wow…it somehow sucked the wind off the surface of the north Atlantic flow…then it came back up, then…our world breathes like our Cetacea. When I (James) wash dishes, the wind generator ramps up to serve power to the battery I just took it from to run the water pump. It happens at the spreed of the resistance we have built into the system. I can hear it when it happens…it’s quite a bit slower than the speed of sound because I notice it. …But not by much. We can do better. We’re at 100% on both house banks and 96% on propulsion 24 hours out of a two week romp through Bermuda. We can do better. Dena’s 1-4 afternoon watch 3:04 pm: It’s hard not to make things up out here. Overactive pattern recognition, I mean, not fibs. The unfoamy crest of a small wave could have been a fin, and the birds have it out for me. Without the blare of constant messaging, the mind will make its own. We got back up to the mid-threes for a couple hours and are now back down to the high-twos. I’m not sad. The breeze is cooling and the solar panels are providing shade. Feels good out here after a couple of hours keeping out of the sun below except to check for other vessels and wind changes. We’ve done well with our one-hour watches between 9 am and 9 pm as far as being able to get out of the sun (or rain) and only hold the on-watch alertness for smaller amounts of time. It doesn’t really lend itself to concentrated endeavours though, and we are both writers. We’re trying a new thing to keep the days from feeling quite so[…]

To Azores Day 1

July 26, 2023 Dena Electrified, Sailing Logs

Tuesday July 25 Planning a sailing voyage that’s going to take weeks is a funny thing to do. We won’t be meeting any schedules (by setting minimum speeds and such, which some people do, and they have to accept carrying and possibly burning weeks’ worth of fuel, which we don’t). We will be taking advantage of all the wind we can get but also reefing anytime we want for an easier ride. Usually, we’re factoring tides and currents, wind and waves forecasts. For a day trip, or even a couple days, we try to arrange things so that we’ll arrive in whatever unfamiliar place during daylight. This trip is unlikely to take as few as 19 days (averaging about 4 knots) or as many as 38 days (a 2 knot average), but it could. Do either. See that enormous difference in time to travel, when the speed only went from a leisurely walk to a power walk? It doesn’t really matter where in between those extremes we end up. There’s no making firm plans on the water, and it does even less good to try over 1800 nautical miles. So we slept in. Got more eggs and hardboiled 6 of them. (The bagger at the grocery store hugged us goodbye.) Checked out of Bermuda with customs and immigration, no hassle whatsoever, and the officer sent us off with “Have a safe journey, my beloveds.” We returned to the boat, loaded the dinghy and weighed anchor. 1:40 pm: First watch Convicts Bay, Bermuda. I (James) hauled anchor and Dena took us out to the Ocean…I don’t know if I will ever have a reason to go back to Bermuda…it’s a nice place to stop in the middle of the Ocean but it’s even better to leave in our wake. I (Dena)[…]

The proving grounds

June 18, 2023 James Cat Stuff, Dena's Blog Posts, Electrified, James' Blog, Life Under Sail

…and then we went 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. 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. 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… …and struggling to get Marlec to do the right thing, but the views were satisfyingly beautiful. We even cut that long hippy hair we’d both grown! When we left there, we spent just under 6 hours getting to a quiet-ish spot off Key Largo’s Crocodile Lake. 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[…]

The Invisible Amount of Money

June 12, 2023 Dena Dena's Blog Posts, Electrified, James' Blog, Life Under Sail

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[…]

Come on, Marlec

June 12, 2023 Dena Boat Projects, Dena's Blog Posts, Electrified

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.