Boat Projects at Home, May 2020
We’re coming into the home stretch on the self-imposed reprovisioning timeline. Unless we run out of essentials (onions, garlic, and the surprise contender cheese) before then, May 20 is the next repro run. We’re so close we’re already starting to fantasize about what we’d like to eat that first night. Here’s hoping I can actually get the items on the list.
Meanwhile, boat projects continue both in the planning realm as well as the actual trial run phase.
Lithium battery build
Jeremy’s building lithium batteries for us. The high price of the “drop in” versions plus his love of a fun project plus his finding of a YouTube channel done by a guy named Will Prouse plus his need to do something other than just woodwork and carpentry . . . yeah, he’s building us batteries. (I’ll do a couple of blog posts on the build and all the parts when they’re all together.)
But the batteries are only part of the picture. There’s the whole monitoring system and management system. There’s making sure the alternator can charge them correctly. There’s hooking them up to alternate power (the generator, shore power, and solar) and all of those monitors/charge controllers.
He’s like a mad scientist, hooking up wires and beeping alerts and setting timers so he can go check on it all.
Of course, as our cruising style has us spending more time at anchor than in any marina, we need a way to charge these new batteries. We’re going with solar; we had a wind generator last time, a hang-in-the-rigging 2-bladed WindBugger that was loud and dangerous - apparently the company folded after a couple of wrongful death suits when the blades came off the pole at high speeds to very ill effect. Though it charged the batteries beautifully in the wind-ripped anchorages of the low-lying Bahamas, it was not a permanently mounted piece of kit that took up bunk space while we were on passage. When it fell apart (literally - the blade fell off one evening at anchor on our way back to the US) we weren’t particularly sad.
2 of our new solar panels arrived the other day. Jeremy hooked them up to the new battery and the solar charge controller and immediately started making power. No noise, no fanfare. Just solid energy.
1 of the new panels.
He’s also been playing around with a diagram of the boat, testing out where we can put panels. One of the drawbacks of Calypso is her beautiful lines - we’re not about to cobble together some weird arch just so we can have more panels. We still need power generation though!
If you look on the stern, you can see 2 angled panels. Gary Felton on Angelsea has 2 panels there, resting on the boomkin. Right now, that’s where the arms of the Monitor windvane are. How could we do that on Calypso?
Let’s just work on another project, shall we? (PS. Jeremy will build this himself. If you find the money tree so we could buy one from Mike Anderson, let us know. We’ve bought plans already from Mike.)
Oh.
We also have decided to sell the house. It’s kind of a boat project, right? Feel free to share the website with anyone looking to buy in Charlottesville!