Saturday, December 10, 2016

Leaving a legacy of knowledge

We have two sailing blogs, one, this one was purposed to be a day to day journal on the water. Somehow when we sold our Youngsun 35, Inspiration, to Bob I envisioned a very quick transition to another boat in more southerly waters.  Life intervened and now it has been since end of season 2011 and no boat.

To be sure we did own Inspiration II for a few seasons but she never really felt like mine and roaming the deck of a Irwin 43 felt foreign to me.  This is something you do not know until you have been acquainted for a while. While below it felt like a nice small flat.  It was reasonably nice to roam around and enjoy all the comforts of home.

The problem came when I envisioned myself as skipper - I did not know or feel real comfortable with all the systems.  Sure, I could repair most of them and the electronics was a slam dunk but there was so much to go wrong that we relied upon for a safe passage.  For example, we had 440 AH in two banks of 220 each. Considering that we would use about 20 AH while running the refridg, autopilot and the rest of the electronics, this gave us one day of power while under way.  So, if the generator did not start recharge us every day for about 3-4 hours the boat was powerless after 2 days.

The main propulsion was rock solid and if we ran the engine we could stay on top of the energy supply and I suppose we sail only 50% of the time.  The generator was 8 KW so it would power the battery charger, Both AC units and all of the electronics, including running the microwave without the main engine running. We had a separate, dedicated start battery for the generator.  The main engine started from the house batteries. ( I am publishing and will continue  in Episode 2).

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