We decided to have a weekend at Konnos bay. Wind should have been 15 knots steady for the sail out. But it wasn't. It was 4-10 knots. So we motor sailed most of the way to Cape Pyla... we call this mode 'snudge' it uses very little electricity (5-10Amps, which means we have 18-24 hours on the batteries to do this) and is almost silent. Some of our nefarious friends suggest it would be great for assisting during races. What it does is to take the prop drag away totally and just move a little more water under the hull. It gives another 0.5-1 knot of speed.
The wind gauge kept playing up and then the compass direction. Most annoying. I even tore off a small piece of light sailcloth to revert to the old fashioned way of telling wind direction.
The chart plotter was really weird. We would suddenly appear to be heading in a totally different direction. We reset the navionics twice. It was not funny. That is till we realised why...
We had added a swimming platform. With the swimming platform went a boarding ladder. And we found a great place to stow it beside the mast in the saloon.
It was neat and tidy and out of the way.
And made of stainless steel.
And right beside the electronic compass!
Anyway... moved that and the chartplotter and wind gauge behaved again.
Wind dropped more. We want to get to Konnos tonight so we started the generator (the motor is hybrid, using generator if we want to use the motor for a long time of motoring). Great. Till the generator died. OK, so try this then... your diesel motor dies and you are 10 miles from the marina or a mooring and the wind has dropped (4 knots) but the swell is pushing you onto the rocky shore.
But we do have the batteries. That is a little further than we would expect to motor without the generator. We didn't know exactly how much we needed for that trip. So we were very careful. But we motored all the way back to the marina.
The interesting thing was the power gauge. By the time we got back to Larnaca Marina it was dark. We have a nominal 96V system, which means that the 97.3 volts the bank had dropped to was about 57% capacity. The Curtis controller thought it was 78%, which needs re-calibrating, but nevertheless to get back with more than 50% of the battery capacity still available shows what you can do with electric drives.
