Green Power

We've just completed one of our most important system upgrades; three 160 watt solar panels that will give us a total of 480 watts of solar capacity.  We're hoping that will be enough to power our daily needs such as; navigation, communication, lights, auto helm and our fridge. On the demand side our electronics & auto helm are new, lower energy use designs, our lights are mostly LEDs and our fridge seems well insulated for a boat. 

Before this we had to run the engine for 2 hours a day, while sailing in order to supply enough electricity for everything minus the fridge.  That's a waste of fuel and engine life plus it harshes the mellow of sailing.  Malo is a beautiful sailor so it's especially wasteful to be using her engine when it's not needed for propulsion.  

Power on a boat is all about balancing needs with supply.  The better we can do that, the easer our sailing life will be.  It's also a good lesson for our land based life too and has got me thinking about solar power for home.  Hello Elon...  But that's for some future time.  Right now we've got our hands full prepping for Malo for our tip to Mexico that will start in just two months from now.  We've got our hands full on that account.  Sometime in the next few days we have over 700' of line coming from the factory that we'll use to replace much of Malo's running rigging.  We also have a lot of small, but essential things to do, in order to get us all set for departure.   

One of the very pleasurable things we did recently was to put the jib sail back on.  We had taken it off at the end of last summer in order to wash, inspect and repair it.  It's a smallish jib, just 105% but it works well with svelte Malo and I'm counting on it's small size being balanced off nicely by the new code 1 gennicker we had made last winter.  

At the suggestion of a sailor who has recently returned from a cruise of the west cost of Mexico I painted our outboard motor in a unique way in order to dissuade theft.  We'll also lock it but I figured that a belt & suspenders approach would be best.   Our dinghy and it's motor are a vital part of our boating equipment so we'd hate to loose either of them in the midst of our cruise.