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 Coming into Sydney heads—the city skyline visible to the right of the mother ship This is a followup to the story about the solar powered zodiac trip Claude and I did from Pittwater to Sydney a while back… I’ve now prepared a video of that trip for your enjoyment. Its posted on youtube and and available here on this page. The trip was an experiment to see how far we could go with a Torqeedo Travel 1003 assisted by solar power… → Read more…  Its a dogs life... The Caboolture River is a quiet picturesque river not far from Brisbane which offers a delightful cruise for a solar boat. → Read more…  Stillness on the Noosa River I’ll write more about this soon, but to be going on with, here is a link to a video of the launching of Stillness  Sienna charging the batteries in the sun Today I towed the Sienna out of the shed and into the sun to test the solar panels and the charging of the lithium batteries. This is the first time the batteries have been charged as a group and they need to be watched carefully for the first few cycles until they become balanced. → Read more…  Looking from entry gate in coaming towards bow I’m now back at Mt Tamborine to finish the electrical installation. I know, I know! Its taking longer than expected to complete this boat. On the back of an envelope I estimated another 16 days to finish the electrical work and get her launched. Allowing for weekends and other projects being shoe-horned in it really means about a month till she’s done. → Read more…  Low cloud and passing rain scuds - and a lovely sunrise Overcast with passing light rain was not what we had in mind for a solar powered journey. Maybe I’d be rowing after all… We left on the mother ship about 5.30am and towed the solar powered zodiac to the start point at Station Beach, at the back of Palm Beach. I boarded the Zodiac at 7.45am and we started the log to track our progress. → Read more…  Here is the skipper's area of the Sienna This project has been occupying my attention since March when I somewhat spontaneously decided to go ahead with it. I had been looking at various boats with an eye to finding one suitable for rental, but I hadn’t seen anything I liked when my friend Claude (Torqeedo Australia) told me about Scruffie Marine’s solar boat. And it took only a week or two of vacillating over it before I took the plunge and ordered one. I did the requisite due diligence on the back of an envelope while at breakfast one morning in hotel at Starnberg where I was with Claude for training at Torqeedo. → Read more…  Plug used for Sienna mould The Sienna will be an easily driven boat and so we don’t expect to need a lot of power to have her at 5 knots. My guess is that her performance would be similar to the Dash 750 and if we look at the power curve for that boat it shows the power needed for at 5 knots is 2000 watts (into the wind). That means we can use a Cruise 2 and at full power of 2000 watts we can expect 5 to 5.5 knots. And in fact probably a bit more because the Torqeedo motors tend to run at slightly above their rating when given full power. For example my Cruise 4 at full power shows 5300 watts on some occasions, and so we could expect up to 2600 watts could be available from a Cruise 2. → Read more… Here’s some pics of Turanor in Brisbane. → Read more…  Phew! Made it to the boatshow with detail work still to do. Well, we made it to the boat show! The Sienna was not totally complete but was in pretty good shape and complete enough that visitors could get a good feel for her. I’m really pleased with how she looks and her lines are better than in the artists rendition. There is still a lot of detail work still to be done and over the next few weeks Derek will finish that while I do the electrical installation. There was lots of interest and many people told us she was the loveliest boat in the show. After acres of white plastic boats coming across an oasis of rich timberwork was manna for footsore boatshow trekkers. The featured timber is Queensland Red Cedar which is very hard to come by these days. → Read more… |
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