Hi Mike,
That sounds great. I've been doing something similar on my last few outings which have been in fairly light airs. Power out of the slip and out of the marina at about 30A, that takes about 30 minutes. Then once out of the marina, raise the sails and reduce the power to about 4A or less. Puffs will reduce the current draw and the slight power assistance keeps my apparent wind up through the lulls. Even without any puffs, my batteries will support more than 25 hours at 4A and have enough left over to get back into the slip. So for a day trip, I haven't been worried about capacity. It's also nice to have some extra power to swing upwind to make it windward of a bouy that I was going to miss by a hundred feet or so.
Quiet, clean and easy. I'm really pleased with how much nicer the boat is to sail with this conversion.
Fair winds,
Eric
Marina del Rey, CA
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, Mike <biankablog@...> wrote:
>
> I recently set out on cruise in very light winds and electro sailed for 37 nm:
> http://biankablog.blogspot.com/2011/07/fine-day-for-electro-sail.html
> I started out bucking some incoming current in the harbor doing about 1.5 knots at around 7 amps before picking up a favoring current outside but, unfortunately had winds under 5 knots all day. I think I may operate this way in future cruises as the current consumption dropped as the light winds occasionally filled the sail and helped things along but, the EP filled in when the winds dropped off. All in all it was a rather pleasant experience thanks to my having EP even though the winds were very light.
>
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