Eric offered: “I would rather be subtle, I'm not one for shouting about my project.”
Same here Eric.
While I have always been gung-ho in converting my boat, writing about it, celebrating electric, etc., at its moorage or in the water, I’ve never wanted to bring too much attention to it being electric. Some reasons to opt for being a bit discreet with your conversion:
· Security concerns---you’ve invested thousands of dollars into your conversion and you may have valuable components right there, easy to steal. If your moorage is uber-safe, if your E-components are not easily accessible or if you have a trailerable boat, then you don’t have much to worry about. For the rest of us, you have tradeoffs to think about.
· Safety concerns---Making it too obvious to your local marina that you have an electric boat that you’ve built yourself might make them a little nervous that while charging in the middle of the night it might cause their marina to go up in flames or cause ground loop problems or worse. And the concern may not start with the marina owner, but some concerned tenant. Lower their concerns by being discreet, careful and establish a safety track record.
· Crossing the line from leading by example to being a self-righteous, in-your-face dweeb---appropriate for a racer, but for ordinary vehicles?
For me, I opted to make the boat a functional EV on the water and a curiosity but without being flamboyant, vain or in your face.
Sure, I’d consider flying an appropriate burgee (e.g. when I take out my steamboat, I like flying the NW Steam Society burgee), but I don’t think I’d put a giant lightning bolt on the side of the boat unless it were embedded in a NW Native American creature motif…
I didn’t start off with this view---after converting my outboard to electric, I wanted to repaint it and make some bold “hey it’s electric” statement. I had similar thoughts about the hull. But then I thought about how I’d feel if I came out and found the motor or batteries were stolen. Then as I spent more and more time out on the boat on the river as an electric, I found it so much more enjoyable to have people figure it out that the boat must be electric rather than my telling them with some boisterous, loud symbol of any sort. The smart ones get it---the others? It doesn’t really matter to me I guess. Trolling for salmon next to other boaters that cock their heads, then say “wow, that must be electric” is much more fun than if I made it painfully obvious, openly gloated or overly EV-promoted it in any way.
So I’m with Eric on this one…but I can see why others might want to shout it out loud---go for it!
-Myles Twete, Portland, Or.
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