Light Houses

Light houses are a beacon of civilization on a dark and lonely ocean. They make great tourist attractions and are often listed in tour guides, but this is only when they are viewed from land.

At sea, light houses carry a different meaning. They are a beacon of danger. They are usually perched on the edge of a cliff signaling the presence of dangerous rocks.

The color of a light house light can vary as well. White simply means that you are being warned of the danger where they are located. Yellow and Red indicate danger, and when you see that color, it means you are in harms way and need to move out to sea in a hurry!

While they stand to identify danger, they also signify the presence of human civilization. When you have been out at sea for weeks on end, seeing the flashing light of a light house will tell you that you have found your new land, and which direction to go to get to shore. You have been alone for so long, and suddenly, you are being guided towards humanity. You will no longer be alone, you will no longer be tossed around, you will soon arrive!

Upgrading to Lithium Batteries, Battle Born vs. Renogy

Electric motors are great, they have few moving parts to maintain or fail, and they can run effortlessly forever…or until the power runs out!

The heart of an electric setup is not the motor, but actually the batteries. These boxes of energy house the electricity that the electric motor needs to propel your yacht. The more power you can carry in your batteries, the more power you can use with your motor.

When we did our conversion to electric propulsion back in 2014, we chose AGM batteries, simply because they were the most cost effective at the time. They provided us with a lot of power in a large space and required little maintenance.

Fast forward to the present, and our AGMs are old and outdated. Better battery technology has come down in price and the “better batteries” of 2014 are no longer prohibitively expensive.

At the moment, there are two companies that seem to be reigning as king over the “direct replacement” lithium batteries. These companies sell lithium batteries that are the same size as the more popular lead acid and AGM batteries, but at a fraction of the weight.

The first company is Battle Born

Source: https://amzn.to/2TfdpoP

These batteries are the same size as a Group 27, but contain the power of a Group 31. Moreover, they only weigh 31 pounds! Our current AGMs are Group 31 and weigh 67 pounds each, meaning these batteries weigh less than half of what our batteries weigh.

The next battery company that we will look at is Renogy.

Source: https://amzn.to/2TgtLO3

Renogy Batteries are also direct replacements for lead acid and AGM batteries, but these are even lighter in weight! Their 100ah battery weighs in at only 28 pounds!

Now that we know the major players in “direct replacement” batteries, lets look at why they are more sought after than a regular lithium battery. The first thing is familiarity. For our entire lives, batteries have been this rectangular box that sits in our boat or car and has two terminals on it. Lithium batteries can come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, which sadly leads to people wondering “which side is the top?” Direct replacement batteries do away with this metal block to lithium by packing it into a familiar shape and size.

The second advantage comes with the voltage. Lithium batteries are made up of cells, and the entire battery pack can have any voltage value you want! This once again becomes a problem since people are used to a battery being 12 volt. In our case where we run a 48v motor, we simply have four 12 volt batteries hooked up in series to create the 48 volts we need to operate. Instead of Battle Born and Renogy offering their batteries in “custom voltages” they packaged them as 12 volt batteries.

You might be wondering, why switch to lithium at all if they take up practically the same space and give you the same amount of power? There are two answers to this question. The first is weight, and the second is usable power.

Lithium batteries weigh less than half of a regular battery. The best way to visualize this is to look at the Amps per Pound at 12 volts.

AGM batteries hold 105 amp hours and weigh 67 pounds
This is to say 1.567 amps per pound

If you want to have a 800 amp hour battery bank, it will weigh (800/1.567) 510.5 pounds.

Battle Born batteries hold 100 amps and weigh 31 pounds.
This is to say 3.225 amps per pound

That same 800 amp hour battery bank would now only weigh (800/3.225) 248 pounds

Renogy batteries, being the lightest, hold 100 amps and weigh 28 pounds
This is to say 3.571 amps per pound

The same 800 amp hour battery bank would weigh just a smidge less at (800/3.571) 224.0 pounds.

So, you might be wondering now, aside from weighing half as much, why bother with expensive batteries? They take up about the same space, and if the boat isn’t overloaded, why bother? Well the truth is, all batteries hold power, but they don’t all let go of the power the same.

Think of batteries as a jar of jelly. They all hold the same amount of jelly, but they differ in how the jar opens.
Lead Acid and AGM batteries have a small opening at the top of the jar, so you can get your spoon straight in, but you can’t get to the sides of the jar. When you have gotten all the jelly you can reach, you notice that there is still a lot of jelly left on the sides, but you just can’t seem to get to it!
Lithium batteries have a much larger opening at the top, so you can get to the sides of the jar much more easily. This lets you get to more jelly and leave the jar more empty when you are finished.

Lead Acid and AGMs can safely discharge down to 40%, while Lithium batteries can safely discharge down to 10%. This means that in a 100 amp hour battery, an AGM can give up 60 amps while a Lithium can give up 90 amps.

So, back to our hypothetical 800 amp hour battery bank, made up of eight 12 volt batteries. The batteries sitting in their box hold 800 amps hours. If these batteries are AGM or Lead acid, they could only give out about 480 amp hours. This identical battery bank made of Lithium batteries could now give out 720 amp hours. That’s an additional 50%, from half the weight!

So, bringing the battery bank and electric motor out of the hypothetical realm and into reality:

Our electric motor draws from our battery bank composed of eight AGM Group 31 batteries, each with 105 amp hours. We can motor at a slow speed of 2 knots for about 20 hours, giving us a range of 40 miles. With a Lithium bank, we would be able to motor 60 miles! That might not sound like much, but that is a lot of miles from the same size of battery bank. Yes, more batteries would give more miles, but space is an issue on a sailboat.

The switch to Lithium will be coming, and we will then be able to compare lithium batteries to AGM in terms of usability and performance.

What is the Purpose of a Stern Overhang

Long overhangs are a common design characteristic of CCA (Cruising Club of America) boats that were very popular back in the 1950s and 60s. These yachts sported short water lines for their length overall and had significantly long overhangs. Wisdom, as pictured when I bought her in 2012 is 45 feet long with a 32 foot waterline. Simple arrhythmic will tell you that we have 13 feet of overhang, most of which is located in the stern.

The idea behind this design is simple, at rest, the yacht has some lovely overhangs that look timeless and classic, but also help cheat the racing rules at the time. The rules measured the boats waterline for its handicap rating, since waterline length directly correlates to maximum speed through the water. A 45 foot yacht has a hull speed of 8.98 knots while a 32 foot yacht has a hull speed of only 7.58 knots.

So, the large yacht with long overhangs gets rated as a smaller yacht with a lower top speed. Then when the wind comes, it heels over and that long overhang goes into the water, giving the speed boost because of the longer waterline.

The stern overhang is the most effective area for this cheating to take place, as it can quickly fall into the water with very little heeling.

We sailed most of the time heeled over to 10 degrees, and the fouling scum on our topside paint is evidence of what parts of the overhang spent the most time underwater. The blue line demarcates the resting (vertical) waterline while the green line demarcates the heeled waterline. The yellow area between the lines is the added wetted surface.

After spending close to a month sailing from Bermuda to the Azores, the fouling growth is very evident on our topside paint. It is plain to see that the bow overhang doesn’t contribute to the added waterline length while the stern adds a considerable amount of length.

Next time you see a yacht with a long stern overhang, imagine how the waterline changes as they sail and that long stern overhang splashes into the sea!

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Dedicated Trysail Track

A trysail is a small storm sail that is flown in place of your mainsail. It usually lives deep in a sail locker stuffed into a bag. Here it typically remains for the entire life of your yacht.

The idea behind a trysail is that should the winds pick up to severe speeds, you can drop your mainsail and raise the trysail. This takes all the stress off your mainsail and puts it solely on a dedicated and purpose built sail.

The problem in this narrative is that the sail is stuffed away where it is forgotten, and therefore, seldom used. In a storm, the last thing you want to do is root through a locker, pull out a sail, remove the mainsail, attach it to the luff, and then raise it. When a storm hits, you want to make your main smaller and get back to the cockpit as quickly as you can!

Having a dedicated track for the trysail allows you to set it up before you leave port so that should the situation arise, it is ready to go.

We flake and then ball up our trysail at the foot of the mast, where it remains laying in wait for the moment we might need it. We have the starboard sheet tied to the clew, so all we need to do is attach the port sheet once the mainsail has been lowered; and its dedicated halyard already attached.

When we need the sail in a hurry, we just drop the main and raise the trysail. The starboard sheet is set, so worst case scenario where we don’t have time to attach the port sheet before raising, we can sail on port tack. The clew of the trysail is low enough that I can easily reach it to tie on the port sheet after it has been raised without reaching overboard or far off the deck (I’m tall though).

With the trysail setup like this, we find that we use it very often, which makes our blue water passages very relaxing and safe, since we can don the storm sails just as easily as we could raise our working sails.