It’s been a lot longer than I would have liked since I made a post here. Boat work hasn’t stopped, but as will become obvious from this post, we haven’t untied the lines or started heading up the Inside Passage. Unfortunately my partner has been dealing with a mysterious health issue since the beginning of the year, and we’ve delayed our plans to deal with it.

But, in the mean time, there’s always boat work. The schedule has changed in a lot of ways, but many projects have been completed and we’ve had time to get a feel for our electrical system and solar panels. The short version? The results are extremely promising.

Raymarine Nav Gear

I completed getting all the gear set up, and once things were all hooked up, the dock-side autopilot calibration wizard worked quickly and easily.

I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t the prettiest installation on the Axiom 2 Pro, but it’s secure and, unlike the old nav display & NavPod, it’s out of our view while at the helm–both my view, and that of my shorter partner.

The autopilot works perfectly well, as do all the instruments. I’ve got some complaints about the Axiom 2 Pro (software-wise) but I think I’ll make a future, more detailed post about that.

New Hydranet Mainsail

We not only were able to raise the new main, we’ve been able to go out sailing several times this year with it. Ballard Sails did an excellent job!

We also got our Gale Sail and have done at least a quick test raising:

Solar Panel power results

The weather was nice enough by early April that I was able to correctly do the through-deck fittings for all the solar panel wires. The results ever since have been very encouraging; by early May I was comfortable enough with the performance that I was able to unplug from shore power, and have remained so ever since. (Mostly: I need to do some re-wiring on the hot water heater so it can run off of our inverter rather than only off of shore power and haven’t gotten around to it yet, so the hot water heater alone has been running off of shore power)

Here’s the entire month of June:

Those are very good results. We’ve been able to run our little BougeRV air conditioner during the hot days in July without any issues, and with the batteries still being near full at the end of each day–the hotter the day the sunnier it tends to be, so the more solar power we’re pulling.

I’m still planning on using the two flexible 170W panels I’ve got in storage to create a solar shade for the boat as well, and I’ve already got the MPPT they’ll hook up to mounted and connected to my Victron network, so with all of this power we’re looking at getting a portable induction cooktop to save on propane use when we’re flush with electrical power. I’m also going to be selling the gasoline-powered Tohatsu 6ph outboard and buying an e-Propulsion Spirit 1.0 Plus, both for weight reasons and to not need to carry gasoline around–a fire hazard.

Life Raft

The life raft is now properly mounted on the stern railing of the boat. Custom mounting job done by our friends over at Ballard Marine Fabricators, the same folks that did the solar panel mounts.

Hopefully we’ll never need to use it, but a single tug of a line and it’ll fall cleanly into the water behind the boat, with the painter attached securely to the frame of the boat.

Boat Status Display

As part of my usage of SignalK on the boat, I got a Raspberry Pi 5 set up with a 7″ LCD, and made the frame and mount in my shop. It’s not touchscreen, which was actually a mistake while ordered it (there are physically-identical touchscreen and non-touchscreen versions), but given that I don’t really intend for it to be interacted with normally, I realized this was just fine, and have a small bluetooth keyboard/touchpad nearby for when I need to interact with it. Right now that interaction is each evening and each morning when I switch the instrument panel from light mode to dark mode.

I’ve also got a full SignalK development environment set up on my laptop and I’m planning on making some contributions to the project soon.

Other shop projects

I’ve been going pretty slow on making knives recently, but here’s one I’m working on, with a nearly 10.5″ blade.