40 Days on a chain

We have been living at anchor since 9th January. We have, apart from food shopping and garbage disposal, been independent of the land for about 6 weeks.

The biggest issue is always fresh water.

We find we have to make water at every opportunity. Supposedly we are making water at 60 litres/hour but we never get capacity from the watermaker. This meant running the generator for sometimes up to 7 hours a day just to keep the tank on reserve. We are enormously pleased that on sunny blue sky days we can now run the watermaker off our two 190W solar panels between 11am and 2pm. This gives the solar panels a payback of about two months but of course today it is cloudy and raining (raining hard so I need a system to catch rain water).

The second issue is that of power.

The generator is a source of noise, heat, and maintenance effort in an always hot engine room. Plus it uses about 2 litres/hour of diesel (so 40 days has utilised about 400 litres of diesel) so the utility bill out on the water is big enough. Too big in fact.

When we started this journey we dismissed green energy sources because they would not have produced sufficient power but having had all lighting converted to LED via Marc at the LED Shop, Las Palmas, our requirements have changed. The solar panels now run the boat during daylight hours and we need a good wind generator (two would be great) to help 24/7.