In the previous almost 14 days, we’ve been reduced to being only a sailboat, since we haven’t succeeded in finding a replacement for our failing starter. We quickly gave up trying to find one in the unpopulated Berry Islands and instead headed towards Abacos: many Americans’ home-away-from-home in the Bahamas.

My biggest worry about not having an engine has mainly been anchoring and leaving the anchorages, but after a couple of good experiences in the Berry Islands and now in the Abacos, I’m slowly adapting, even though Henrik and I strongly disagrees on how much space we need in an anchorage: Henrik thinks we only need a couple of boat lengths to manoeuvre safely around, while I need at least 10 just to consider it!

Henrik’s worry has on the other hand concerned our batteries. We spend about 120 amp hours a day, when we are at anchor, and usually we need to run the engine a couple of hours every third day to maintain power on the batteries. We have five solar panels adding up to 240 Watt, and on a sunny day on in these circumstances, we generate about 50 amp hours in total.

On top of that we have a mounted wind turbine and a towing generator that converts in to a wind turbine. They both need quite a bit of wind though, to give more than 1 amp each an hour, but with a little wind on a sunny day, we make do if we’re being sensible with our usage.

We have a battery monitor that tells us many amps we use or add, and during the last weeks we’ve practically been obsessed by looking at it! We’re constantly checking to see, if it’s in plus or minus, and we’re doing everything we can to maximize our input and minimize our output: Henrik angles the boat on the anchor so we’re at right angles to the sun to get the most of our solar panels; we find anchorages, where we’re not in the lee of the wind; we don’t use computers and iPads more than absolute necessary; we’re constantly trying to test how much we can turn down the freezer without the contents defrosting; and when we’re sailing, we don’t turn on any instruments, if we can avoid it. And everything has gone well until a few days ago, when, unusual for the season, there’s no longer any wind and the last days has been mainly cloudyd!

We can spend a maximum of 240 amp hours of our total battery capacity of 440 amp hours, and we’re getting near an alarming minus 200 with another wind- and sunless day ahead. The weekend however looks better with a lot of wind and sun, so now we’re hope to manage until next week, where generating power will be a lesser problem: The weather forecast predicts stormy weather across the Bahamas (The forecast varies between 30 and 50 knots of wind).

What happened to the carefree life as a cruiser?

Signe Storr - Freelance journalist and friend of Boatshed