A storm is coming and you are in a safe harbor, but how safe is it if you don’t know how to properly setup your anchors? In this video, I will show you how to anchor safely with one, two, and three anchors! I also show you how to set up Bahamian Moorings and Star Moorings to really hold you steady no matter the conditions that await you!
Lithium Battery Power is coming!
When we converted to electric propulsion back in 2014, the price of a lithium battery pack was over $27,000! We opted for an AGM battery bank instead which cost us $1,800.
Years went buy and we went cruising, sailing about 5,000nm on those batteries before they died. The plan was to replace the batteries with lithium when the AGM batteries died as their price should come down by then.
In 2018, lithium batteries had come down in price a bit and now would cost us $16,000. Cheaper, but still way too expensive! We were in Europe at the time and the only batteries we could afford that would also fit in our battery box were Sealed Lead Acid batteries. Not the best choice for an electric motor but at $1,200 for 8 of them, the price was right and we decided that the next battery bank would be Lithium.
The time is now! Lithium batteries for our boat have now come down in price further and would cost somewhere between $8,000 and $11,200 depending on the brand.
this is cheaper than the original $27,000 from 2014, but sadly still beyond our budget. Thankfully, lithium batteries have been on the market for long enough that DIY people have had time to fool around with them and make nifty kits and systems.
We are building our own battery for a price of $4,800. To boot, this battery bank is going to hold more power than the other battery bank we had been planning on installing!
The cells are like giant D batteries which will connect together in series and parallel connections to make a large battery pack out of small components.
Stay tuned for detailed information on how to build your own LiFePO4 battery pack!
Which is the Best Sail Cloth?
When outfitting your sailboat with a new suit of sails, the question of sail cloth will come up. This video will help you navigate the three most common types of sailcloth so that you can have your sails made from the material that is best for your intended purposes.
The Secret to a Good Nights Sleep
You need two things to sleep soundly on your cruising boat:
A calm anchorage
A good anchor
If the boat is still and everything is calm, you will sleep like a baby without the need to keep an ear awake for odd sounds that mean trouble, having a good anchor (like our Mantus anchor) means that you won’t need to worry about dragging in the night, so your boat will stay right where you intended it to.
While a calm anchorage and a good anchor are excellent and obvious tips to a good nights sleep, the good anchorage part doesn’t always happen.
Sometimes there are bad conditions, high traffic, or just a plethora of other issues that can make wonderful sleep seem elusive. This is where having an anchor drag alarm comes in.
We have the Vesper XB 8000 which has a built in anchor drag alarm. It shows you where you have been swinging and let’s you set the radius of the circle. If the boat slips out of the ring, a very loud alarm goes off!
This means you can sleep and if anything happens, it will wake you up to deal with it, until then, you can have a great nights sleep without the aforementioned calm anchorage (but you still need a good anchor).
How COVID has changed cruising
It used to be that when you arrived in a new country, you flew your Q flag for the few minutes it took to get cleared in. The yellow quarantine flag rarely saw any use since it was only set for a short amount of time.
With Covid, all of that has changed and our Q flag is seeing a lot more time flying from our starboard spreader!
COVID-19 has granted tiny countries incredible power, control the likes of which they never had before. As Americans with our blue passport, we used to be able to arrive in practically any country and simply check in. No visas ahead of time or any hassle!
In the name of Covid, however, countries are now able to ban any person they desire granting them authority that was always out of grasp!
When we got to Cape Verde, instead of going to the customs office like normal, we were told to wait indefinitely at anchor until the authorities came to our boat to clear us in. On the 5th day of waiting, I called a friend who called in a favor for me to finally get us checked in; otherwise, we would still be anchored and waiting!
Covid has completely changed the cruising world, altering it from a freeing experience in world travel to a test in bureaucracy. Before setting sail, you need to see if a country is even open to cruisers; more importantly, whatever it says today could be completely different by the time you arrive! Then you have countries with no real form of government struggling to create the illusion of control by stonewalling any attempts you make at legally checking in and forcing you to subvert the entire process by residing at anchor unannounced.
The saddest part is when corrupt government officials only allow you to check in after paying a bribe to them. The villagers in their towns are starving from the lack of tourists due to this political power play, yet the police watch as their own town withers further into poverty as they reject all tourists who refuse to line their pockets.
This is the ugly side of the pandemic, nothing to do with disease control or the well being of its citizens; just incomprehensible power granted to those who cannot fathom its repercussions!
