Paul Cassel wrote in
:

What ran your batteries down to 50% in a day? That seems pretty low to
me.



Skip's Morgan 46 is more like a 3BR 2BA house than a barebones sloop
with a handheld GPS on a lap board. There are plenty of electrical
loads on the 660AH (I think) house battery bank...fridge, freezer,
lighting, computers he reports to us on, a fine array of radios, sailing
instruments, navigational tools anyone would be proud to own. He
doesn't need puny WEFAX charts, though he can produce them on any
frequency, because there is an automatically receiving direct GOES 137
Mhz weather satellite system aboard.

It's one of the nicest-equipped sailboats I've ever been aboard. This
all takes power...lots of power. He charges from large solar panels
over the stern above the davits for the dingy, a nicely installed wind
charger which I think from his recent posts is the reason power has
drained out....because with a FOLLOWING wind, wing-n-wing sailing
downwind, the apparent wind over the wind charger is near zero...not the
constant 15-25 amps he normally creates from it. So, he's made a
mistake that's my pet peeve with sailors...."I can charge the batteries
in 30 minutes at 5000A", which is simply not possible due to physics and
chemistry, whether sailors like it or not...

The wind'll shift around to a more favorable charging position in the
wind genny after he rounds the Cape, I hope....giving him back his 15-
25A nice slow, but persistent, charging, 24/7.

Until then, he whould be slowly recharging at 1500 RPM from the Perkins
idling away in the bilge....whether it powers the boat much or not.

I believe he also has a 2KW Honda EU2000i superquiet gas genset aboard
he can deploy to run the 40A main charger he installed with me watching
while they were in Charleston last. That would also give him AC power
to run the fridge/freezer/computers and other loads that should be
running on AC to give the house batteries more time to properly
recharge. That would be my choice. Mine is only an EU1000i and it has
charged for many hours at sea very nicely on little fuel.

TURN HER INTO THE WIND, SKIP! LET THE WIND GENNY WORK A WHILE!