My friend Rich Boren of CruiseRO Water and Power commented several years ago, “cruisers never complain about having too much fresh water or electrical power on their boat”. Rich and his family had cruised for several years in the Sea of Cortez, a very sunny and beautiful part of the world where the fishing is still pretty good and whale sharks are commonly seen. Jacques Cousteau once called it “the world’s aquarium”, and he wasn’t kidding.
Isabel and I cruised the Sea of Cortez for 3 seasons and especially enjoyed the more remote areas towards the North. No cell phone signal, tiny settlements with tiny shops and almost nothing to buy (including fresh vegetables, gasoline or diesel), but great fishing and the locals are very friendly. Up there if you get in trouble you’re likely on your own. Any help, be it the Mexican Navy or the US Coast Guard is a long way off, and there’s no such thing as a subscription towboat service that sells annual insurance. It’s not for everybody. Those folks that need a stronger sense of security tend to cluster around La Paz or Loretto where shops and gringos abound.
We cruised sunny Mexico from October into June in latitudes between 17 and 31 degrees North. Back then JollyDogs sported 920 watts of solar panels with a single solar controller, and 800 amp hours of LiFeP04 batteries. In that environment we had enough power input and storage capacity to run all the boat electrics with impunity, including our AC powered 30 gallons per hour CruiseRO water maker. It rarely rains along that part of Pacific Mexico, especially up in the Sea, so we’d occasionally make enough water to wash the dust and salt off the boat. That’s something superyachts do, not many cruising boats. A clean boat is a happy boat.
During our refit before launching across the Pacific, I installed new solar panels, each with an individual controller, and all new LiFeP04 batteries, so we now have 1440 watts of solar power and 720 amp hours of batteries. My objective was to be able to make long passages without having to generate power using fossil fuel. Sailing East to West does help with the solar panel orientation at least until early afternoon. Even with the autopilot grinding away and all the marine electronics on, the energy equation worked out pretty well as it was generally a sunny passage.
It’s nearly mid-November here in the Southern Hemisphere, late Spring. We’re currently at 17 degrees 30 minutes South latitude. Over the past week we’ve had days of brilliant sunshine and others with heavy overcast and rain. On the sunniest days around noon I’ve seen outputs as high 115 amps from our solar array, on the cloudiest and rainiest days as little as 2 amps. Our large energy storage capacity has allowed us to bridge over a couple of heavily overcast days at a time, but I’m been astonished at how poor the output can be in foul weather.
Rainwater catching systems are a great idea, but so often when it rains heavily it’s also really windy, so flexible, stowable systems might not work so well. A better approach is a cabin top that’s properly built to trap and divert rainwater to scuppers where it can be diverted to fill containers. A cabin top that’s easily kept clean to avoid serious risk of water contamination is also a nice design feature. JollyDogs wasn’t designed with this in mind and we only catch rainwater in buckets to use for laundry.
We deplete our freshwater resources regardless of sky conditions, and on those cool rainy days we also wish for a hot shower. We can make hot water either by running the port engine or the AC powered hot water heater, but that uses a lot of electricity, so we either need a good solar day or pretty full batteries.
Our observations may drive us to select a more energy efficient (and much more expensive) water maker next time, but for now we’ve definitely got better than a 90% solution. Rich was right. You’ve never got too much freshwater or too much power.
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