I arrived in the Caribbean, in March 2022, after sailing from the UK. My boat is a 1979 Cobra 1050 with a bilge keel and electric drive.
I wanted to give a bit of an in-site into how I feel the renewable energy system and the electric engine is helping after almost 3 years of use.
The weather in the Caribbean has lots of sun and trade winds. Perfect for charging via renewable energy systems.
A lot of folk don’t like wind generators. My personal opinion is that you should use both.
I don’t have a degree in Physics but do have a good practical understanding of how solar and wind generation work, as I sit at anchor for months in Grenada.
Both solar and wind power make a limited amount of power, but because there, there most of the time they make a huge difference to the state of charge in your batteries. Actually charging your batteries as you use them.
Here in the Caribbean we get daylight, on most days for say 11 hours a day. A lot of that daylight has sunshine, so solar is very good here. But we get night time for more than half the day. I have only 400 watts of solar power, not really enough for my basic needs but very close.
Next is my Rutland 1200 48v/493w max, wind generator. There are a lot of wind generators that don’t seam to work well. At least that’s what I’m told. This Rutland is very quiet but you can here the wind forcing it to work, it’s a good sound.
The Caribbean has the trade winds day and night, but not all the time. My wind generator contributes when it spins, and when it’s really windy it’s awesome.
Both solar and wind power together give me the power I need to live a decent sustainable life at anchor. There both free after you’ve brought the equipment and environmentally clean once there made. I understand they eventually become trash, which isn’t perfect.
I also have an electric outboard (Torqeedo 1103). It’s so much more satisfying to me to know I don’t need to buy fossil fuel and am living a clean as I can be.
The Lynch Marlin electric drive is the icing on the cake. My renewable energy system charges the batteries which power my house and my engine. I would never go back to diesel, electric propulsion is reliable and easy to use. We just need to get used to it and I’m sure we will eventually have to.
Ive lived on boats for a long while and genuinely used to have in the back of my mind that my Diesel engine wouldn’t start. That thought is dramatically reduced now I use electric, it’s so reliable and I know the clean fuel is there.
If you sail, keep it simple and use good batteries, the range is absolutely enough. So when the time is right, do the research and see if it could work for you.
