Boot Key Harbor

We began the week with a sail from our anchorage in Newfound Harbor to Boot Key Harbor in Marathon. It was our first real, post-refit sail, with all the sails up and a brisk wind. The boat handled beautifully. We still have some rigging adjustments to make, but we were very pleased with the new sails.

Boot Key Harbor is a gem–a fully protected harbor with a vibrant mooring field community of cruisers and local liveaboards. The City Marina does a great job managing the moorings. Everyone here is friendly and helpful. There’s a strong sense of community.

Settling in to the Lifestyle

We’re enjoying shelter here in the harbor from persistently strong easterly winds and a parade of late season cold fronts. We’re using the time to organize things on the boat and work on project odds and ends.

There’s an important point about organizing things on an offshore cruising boat. It’s not good enough to put things on shelves. Beth Leonard, an accomplished cruiser-writer, gives this advice: Take a photo of everything in the cabin. Turn the photo upside down. Everything that would fall out or get damaged needs to be lashed, fastened, or otherwise secured. That is a lot of work!

Settling into the full-time cruising lifestyle has been remarkably satisfying. The simple pleasures bring so much joy: rowing the dinghy ashore, walking a mile to the grocery store, sipping tea on the stern at twilight.

Empowered with Solar Power

Our first couple of weeks off the dock have tested our new electrical system, and the results so far are very good. We’ve covered all our electrical needs with solar. That includes running the watermaker to make fresh water and cooking with the electrical induction burner. We’ve used very little propane, and we haven’t run the gas generator at all except for testing. Finding gas and propane, and ferrying them to the boat on the dinghy, can be a major task. We’re very happy so far to get by with solar energy.

We’ve fitted the boat with a relatively simple but sophisticated electrical monitoring system. I’m loving having data at our fingertips. I can spend hours geeking out over this stuff!

Overall, the solar panels are keeping up with electrical consumption, with the batteries reaching full charge most days by mid-afternoon. Battery state of charge has never fallen below 65%, meaning we’re using no more than about a third of the battery bank’s capacity each day. At that level of discharge we can expect 5,000 cycles from the lithium batteries. That’s around thirteen years of service.

This chart shows our electrical production and consumption over the past week. The blue on the top of the chart shows battery charge levels each day. Average consumption is around 4 kilowatt hours. (By comparison, an average American home consumes about 30 kilowatt hours a day.)

Our boat is fairy simple. We don’t have air conditioning. We use the sun to heat water for showering and washing dishes. It’s been relatively cool for this time of the year, so we haven’t been running fans. But we have been making water and cooking on the induction cooktop. The weather has generally been sunny, but even on cloudy days we’ve kept up with electrical generation. It will be harder when we get a prolonged spell of cloudy weather. It will also be harder on passages, when the sails will significantly shade the solar panels. Overall, though, we look set to achieve our energy goals–to live comfortably off grid without having to lug a lot of propane cylinders or gasoline jerry cans in the dinghy.

Waiting out the Weather

April weather has been typical. Absolutely beautiful but windy and rough for making progress toward the Bahamas. Strong easterly winds rule out an east-bound sail across the Gulf Stream. Relief from easterlies comes only from occasional cold fronts, but those fronts bring strong north-component winds. North winds opposing the north-flowing current of the Gulf Stream make for dangerously steep waves. There hasn’t been a good crossing window in the last two weeks.

So here we are, only fifty miles from Key West, learning and living the most important rules of the cruising lifestyle: be flexible and be prepared to wait.