A Little Cruise Aid for a Sustainable Florida
...finally begins!
We departed Pirates Cove, Alabama yesterday at 11:50 am (after the batteries were completely charged up) and headed on our way to the Florida state line powered by solar. No more diesel! It was a good passage with plenty of sunshine until the last couple hours or so. The sun went behind some clouds just about the time we hit the Big Lagoon. We had planned to arrive at Robert's Pass into Pensacola Bay to coincide with the tides so that we could use the current to help us through. We saw the strong current of this particular section as we came through on the diesel and knew that it would be best to come back during an ebb tide so we would be moving in the direction of the current and not against. We had not planned on the sun hiding behind a cloud through this critical time and we had depleted a fair amount of our battery reserve getting to this point because it had been partly cloudy for the last 3 hours! We slowed down to match our energy use with the incoming sun to save what little battery we had left. The tide had slacked and it wasn't really ebbing yet but we made it. The sun popped out at the last minute, the amps came up from the panels and we scooted on thru. Now the sun was very low and to our stern as we where heading East so Carter scoped an anchorage to the North. We turned North, raised the panels to face the setting sun for another 10 amps and coasted up to the lighthouse with battery to spare. Talk about nail biting!
18 miles to our stern running on nothing but the sun against a consistant 12 mph headwind, a 1+ mph current, and partly cloudy sun for the last three hours. Not too bad. It's predicted to rain for the next two days so we'll just hunker down and wait for the sun to come out and do it again.
The official beginning of a Little Cruise Aid for a Sustainable Florida
A toast at the Florida state line. A little early in the day but it's 5 o'clock somewhere.
After many, many months...well maybe even a couple years...of planning our solar powered cruising life, we are on our way!
Radar wants to be with us at all times when under way but unfortunately, he wants to be directly under our feet at the helm. I decided it's time to fix this problem and brought a comfy rug, blanket and his pillow, placed them in a couple different places around the cockpit trying to find a location that is out of our way but makes him happy. He finally chilled out and took a nap directly in front of the control panel where he can see everything that's going on. I guess he feels safe enough when he can see us.
You can see the brisk current we were heading into almost all day...and the electric motor performed well. We adjusted the throttle to keep our energy use on par with the solar energy that was coming in. The weather got partly cloudy about 2:30 though which required us to sip off the battery bank a little more than we wanted too. Carter likes to keep it full in case we need the extra power for an unscheduled emergency situation. Those lead acid golf cart batteries really aren't up to the task and he has his eye on some Lithium Ion technology made for industrial fork lifts that would solve all our energy storage shortcomings but he'll have to fix a whole lot of air conditioners before we'll have the money for that, lol. We'll just muttle thru with what he calls our "Flintstone" system. But hey, it's working! Yaba Daba Doo!
It's predicted to rain for the next 3 days so we'll hunker down and wait for the sun to come back out. I supposed even if we weren't trying to do this 100% solar, we'd still be doing that because we wouldn't be cruising in the rain anyway.
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