Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat

Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife:

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

I suppose every wife in any generation wants their husbands to be safe, but each generation has a different approach to risk and adventure. I know my wife would be resolutely opposed to any voyage like this (says the man with a dream of sailing a Hobie Cat across the Great Lakes...perhaps when my son is grown).

This page also includes a 100x136 pixel high-resolution color digital photo of the boat, and the year: 2002.

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/potter.html

There's also an update page with a GIF animation of the weather accompanied by the text "WARNING!!! file size: 1.5 MBytes"

From the article:

> The batteries were charged for about 1 hour daily using a Honda EU 1000 gasoline generator coupled with a 3-stage battery charger. The generator burned 1-1/2 gallons of gas in 24 days. ... There was no backup power source for charging the batteries.

24 hours of runtime and 1.5 gallons of gas equate to 0.625 gallon usage per hour. From the spec sheet, an EU1000 generator has a 0.55 gallon tank and can run for 6.8 hours at 225W output, that's 0.081 gallons per hour, so I estimate that the generator was operating at about 174 watts, given it ran for an hour that's 174 watthours per day.

23 years later, anyone would assume that your default source of 174 watthours per day would be a solar panel. A single 2x3 foot rigid panel would do ~100W peak and see the equivalent of 4-6 peak hours per day, easily beating that requirement. Any serious sailboat (even a little trailerable 19' coastal boat like this one) would have a whole array powering lighting and sensors and radar/radios and telemetry and would budget much more than that.

I lived on a catamaran around 2000 onwards as a kid. Solar panels were surprisingly widespread, particularly on multis with outboards (and therefore limited ability to make power through alternators). Obviously the $/W sucked, but people also didn't have as many power draws. One big drawback was older generations of solar panel had terrible performance in partial shading. A stay or rope shadow passing over the panel was a big issue because of fewer bypass diodes, simpler battery chargers, and so on. That sort of thing is a bigger issue for a yacht with less clear space for panels.

So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.

Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.

Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.