Another dawn departure and a
beautiful sunny day! We were able to
sail much of the way as we had good winds and following swells. In fact, it was so beautiful and stable both
Tad and I spent much of the afternoon on the foredeck in the sunshine.
It was a pretty uneventful day
and we did not go ashore in Sines so this is a good opportunity to tell you a
little about some of the ‘mod cons’ on our little floating home.
Our main energy comes from the
solar panel array that Tad spent so much time (and money!) on in La Rochelle –
it has paid off in dividends. Although
we are recharging the batteries whenever we motor (which has been more than we
anticipated), the solar is keeping up with our use while at anchor.
Our water-maker (essentially a
desalinator) is a godsend – we make about 65 litres of fresh water from
seawater every hour that it is running and we usually run it for at least a
couple of hours daily to top off the tanks.
In fact, we have not needed to take on water since we filled up in A
Coruña 10 days ago!
This is in spite of the fact that we both have daily hot showers and of
course wash dishes as well as do laundry.
We have found that the watermaker functions fine on just solar power as
well which means that we will be able to have water even at anchor should we
need it!
On the subject of
laundry, our one indulgence was to install a washing machine. It is a Bosch front-loader and quite simply
the most efficient machine ever invented!
It can function on an array of settings and heats its own water which
has both advantages and disadvantages: the advantage is that it doesn’t use our
hot water supply (which is not huge at 40 litres and is only heated when we run
the engines at this point), but the disadvantage is that to use one of the
settings that involved heated water needs shore power as it is too much for our
inverter. The cold water setting uses
less water than a shower! I began our
journey by separating the clothes into lights/whites and darks/coloured, but
soon realized that all our clothes are well-used and mixing them in cold water
really doesn’t hurt them. Plus the fact
that I like to fill the machine with each load and we generally do not have
enough of one or the other of the wash categories to make enough for two
loads. The exception is our bedding –
having a queen-sized bed with flat sheet, fitted sheet and doona cover (REALLY
holding out to put the doona away once we reach warmer climes!) means at least
two loads as the machine will hold only 7kg worth of washing at a time. This
means that towels also need to be done separately. The machine is wonderfully efficient in its
use of water as well as spinning things to within a short distance of being
dry. Once washed, I take the clean
laundry and hang it in our enclosed helm station (aka “Pope Mobile” as that it
what it looks like), where it dries within a very short time during the day or
overnight if we are at anchor or in a marina.
The beauty of hanging up the laundry in the “Pope Mobile” is that it is
not obvious to the outside world that Robin’s Laundromat is in action, whereas
we see plenty of boats with all their undies and socks and t-shirts hanging
along their rails. Of course the sheets
and towels are a different matter and need to be hung to dry on either the
genoa sheets (ropes for the uninitiated) or the gennaker sheets on the
foredeck.
Our stove and oven
are gas – here in Europe they use butane or propane which burns hotter than LPG
and so things cook very quickly, which I suppose means using less gas. The downside of the gas here is that it is
only universally available in small blue ‘camping gaz’ containers of about
9L. As we also have a gas-powered BBQ
brought with us from Australia, we have two gas bottles but they do seem to
last rather a long time in spite of being used daily.
We also have a
freezer and two fridges – this may seem a luxury but we are managing with the
power that we have. The freezer was a decision primarily to be able to stock up
on meat and frozen goods for a long passage (eg. Crossing the Atlantic); the
inside fridge is a two-drawer device which works really well and has plenty of
room for fruit, veggies and other items needing to be chilled. We use the smaller bar-type fridge in the cockpit
area for our water and beer and this actually gets turned off at night to
conserve energy. It is still managing to keep our water and beer cool!
The main consumer of
energy (other than the fridges and freezer) is the electronics; the navigation
system (Ray, short for the make Raymarine) and the autopilot (Otto). As they are on pretty much all the time, they
drain our batteries the most. We do
switch them off at night once we are anchored/moored/berthed. Our internal lights for the boat are LED and
so consume very little energy, however we do have an electric ‘head’ (toilet
for the non-boaties out there) in the master ensuite. This was a ‘treat’ for me from Tad so that I
would not have to pump each time I used the toilet. Those of you who have used a boat toilet
would understand what a luxury this is.
Charging phones,
computers, etc. usually happens when motoring as well, although there is no
problem doing it while sailing as long as we have lots of sun to top up the
batteries!
We have an electric
winch which we use to raise the mainsail, and an electric windlass to
raise/lower the anchor but that is the extent of our electronic gadgets. Most of the boat is still ‘manual’ enough to
keep us busy but ‘automatic’ enough to make it fun and relatively simple.
Sines is a pretty
little harbour with a lovely new marina office – clean spacious showers and
toilets and an ATM in the office which is very convenient. We did not spot any restaurants near the
beach although there was a bar/café on the beach where we anchored. Even though the wind blew strongly until the wee hours, we felt very secure and comfortable.
The harbour of Sines at dawn
Hi Robin / Tad- it's interesting to learn about your approach for water, solar, etc and how you're getting on! Hope to see it all in action someday soon! Remember to stay off reefs! Carry on smartly!
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