Salinas was a deeply useful stop. We anchored and paid the marina a modest fee to have a month’s access to (clean) showers, a place to leave our trash, and an address for packages. It was time to finalize the LiFePO4 house batteries plan, wherein we would change battery chemistry and location. We’d been lugging the battery cells themselves around since Red Hook (St. Thomas, USVI) but got stopped up on the installation design. They were in their forever home, which is under the nav station seat slash diesel engine start battery home on the Baba 30’s original plans. Instead of a single group 24 starting battery, though, we would use that area for eight 3.2 volt, 230 amp-hour lithium cells. Four cells wired in series makes a nominally 12 volt battery bank so we were creating two 230 amp-hour battery banks, either of which supplies 184 amp hours of usable power. That compares very favorably to the 255 amp-hour 8D AGM that was doing duty as Battery 1 because, after 17 years in service, the voltage was cratering before the state of charge (SOC) got below 80%. That means we’d been living on about 50 amp hours per bank, and the new system would explode our capacity from our point of view. Once we’d drawn up the system and identified what parts we needed, we placed a bunch of orders from across the boatersphere and started the rounds of reprovisioning, cooking, cleaning, and showering that kept us busy until the shipments could arrive. There were so many aspects of this project that were hard to measure, literally. Getting a tape measure to tell the truth about the complex curve inside a sailboat hull is like getting a cat to stay out of a project that he can’t help with.[…]
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