Shaping up To Be a Great Run

Dare I say it?  Could this be our fastest run yet?  I am hesitant to declare victory though lest I jinx it.

Early in the trip, we were very focused on getting across the Gulf Stream and ran the engine for hours to be sure that we got far enough south and east to be ahead of a strong front.

We did well but caught the end of that front which gave us high 20s with gusts to the low 30s on a very deep reach overnight.  Yes, we were going pretty fast, sometimes breaking 10kts briefly but it was pretty bumpy.  We put away the jib and sailed under a double reefed main.

As of now, 10:00 Sunday, we have been sailing for nearly 30 hours without the engine.

To that point, this is the first run that I have done since having the new lithium batteries, new and larger solar panels and a wind generator installed and It’s great to see that things are working out.

After running for all that time with no engine to recharge the batteries, they are still charged to 88%.   The new solar did some of that but a big boost was from the wind generator that mostly kept up with the instruments overnight.  Having said that, we were mostly off the wind so the apparent wind was not all that high so it could not keep up with the refrigeration as well.

I do expect that by this afternoon most of the power will be back in the batteries as it’s a fairly sunny day.

having the batteries well supported by wind as well as solar is a huge difference from having to run the engine twice a day to keep the batteries up with the load of running the instruments 24 hours a day.

I’ll be keeping track of how the system works in the “real world” and will try to summarize things down the road.  One thing for sure is that solar and wind work well together but the biggest output for the dollar is surely solar at about $1/watt.

I’ll stop there for now except to say that the trip is going well and we are hoping, expecting perhaps, that the rest of the trip will bring reasonable conditions.

Dare I say that we might actually do the run in 9-10 days?  That would be great.

While we are still in the early days of this passage, it is beginning to look like this is shaping up to be a great run.

I hope so.