Tag: solar power

Thirty Days at Sea From Panama to Polynesia

Our longest passage yet will likely be our longest passage ever if I can choose. I expected the voyage from Panama to Polynesia to be a mix of bad and good. I was correct. Compared to others who did the journey, thirty days at sea from Panama to Polynesia was average. I’m happy it’s over.

Passage Problems

Even on a short sail problems inevitably pop up, so with a 3800 mile+ passage, we knew anything could happen! Since we arrived in Nuku Hiva unharmed and with no major boat damage, we count ourselves lucky but the sail from Panama to French Polynesia was far from perfect.

No wind

Leaving Panama, we expected to have very little wind, and we were right. The first few days of the passage we crawled and we covered very little ground. In fact, many followers noticed our boat do a big circle on our map tracker. It wasn’t a mistake. With no wind and trying to conserve fuel that early in the trip, that was our actual course that day! Fortunately, that section of Panama was the lightest wind we had on the voyage. Unfortunately, it was the end of the warm weather. We were in hoodies soon after!

No Sun

Even worse for us with our new lithium batteries and upgraded solar panels was the absolute lack of sun. While we didn’t have much rain and only a couple minor squalls on the trip from Panama to Polynesia, the clouds followed us for weeks! Fortunately we brought a lot of gas for our generator because we used it! We had to run it early and often to keep our battery – and autopilot and chart plotter – running at night. Which leads us to another problem!

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Prepping for Our Pacific Crossing

We have a big trip ahead of us from Panama to French Polynesia (FP). The sail of over 3000 miles will take us around a month. Can I repeat that? Since we’re not going to The Galapagos, our sail will take about a month. Which is why we’ve spent most of our time prepping for our Pacific crossing. We want to do this right.

I had numerous checklists (I am that type) and our preparations fall into a few categories: making Sava ship-shape, getting everything we need for the passage, and mentally readying ourselves for the longest trip of our lives.

We are leaving today, so we’re done prepping for our Pacific crossing. We’ll see in a few weeks what we did right.

Getting Sava Ship-Shape

We’ve been pretty good about keeping Sava up-to-date, including our most recent lithium battery upgrade. But boats are like houses: something always breaks. Before we set sail, we want to make sure everything is in working shape, and that we have backups of our backups. It’s an important part of prepping for our Pacific crossing.

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We Upgraded Our Boat to Lithium

Living on a boat has made us very aware of power usage. Our boat mostly runs on 12V power – lights, fans, water pumps, instruments – which comes from batteries on the boat. In this post, I’ll detail why and how we upgraded our boat to lithium batteries. We think it’s a good decision.

Rules of Batteries

Batteries on a boat are challenging. There’s all sorts of rules on things you should and should not do with traditional boat batteries. The main rules as we understand them:

  • Replace them all at once
  • Never let them go below 50% charge
  • Make sure they are all the same type and brand

It goes on. But the world of batteries is changing rapidly with innovation going on in other industries finding its way into the world of boats. The new technology uses Lithium Ion and is far more efficient and takes up far less space.

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