This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's) planning and preparation for cruising the Great Loop, and once on the water, our cruising adventures!
C-DORY 25 CRUISER AS LOOP BOAT
Our choice of boat for the Loop is dictated by the fact that we own our 2005 C-Dory 25 Cruiser, Daydream, free and clear, so we have no need to buy a boat or factor that into our costs. It is a great boat, and it meets Capt John's tests, at least for us:
"The kind of boat you choose for making this voyage must be no smaller than one
you can live comfortably on. It should also be no larger than one can safely handle alone."
We know from experience we can live comfortably on Daydream. Although our longest cruise to date has been two weeks, after 11 years of cruising in the San Juan Islands, Canadian Gulf Islands, Princess Louisa Inlet, Desolation Sound, Lake Roosevelt in Eastern Washington, the Idaho lakes Priest and Pondereille, Lake Powell in Utah, and the Inland Passage to Alaska, we know what it feels like to live in such a small space and have never had any problem with that! We probably won't be the party boat however!
We do not live as total minimalists on Daydream either! Our friends Bill and El Fiero, whose website Cruising America - Halcyon Days (which is also an an Amazon Kindle book) and cruising lifestyle are admired by virtually every C-Dory owner, consider us somewhat extravagant by their standards! Their website and book are excellent reads and highly recommended!
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| Bill and El Fiero on Halcyon, Nisqually Delta, 2007 |
We are confident we meet Capt. John's second test too. Since Patty and I first took the Power Squadron Boating Safety Course in 2003, we have shared equal time at the helm, equal time navigating (she is better at it than I am), equal time docking, and equal time anchoring. I remember the first time she pulled away alone from the dock at Squalicum Harbor in Bellingham to cruise for three days alone after dropping me off because I had to go back to work. She said it was exhilarating, especially because nobody was telling her to "do this" or "do that"! Mea culpa! In many ways, she is more skilled than I at handling this boat, but we are each confident that either of us can handle Daydream safely.
We also know we won't be the first C-Dory to do the Loop! It is reassuring that quite a few other C-Dorys, both 22' and 25', have successfully completed the Loop in prior years!
DAYDREAM'S SPECIFICATIONS
We know we will be the smallest, or next to smallest, boat wherever we anchor or dock on the Loop. In a world of big motorhomes, we are the VW Camper Van of boats! We are used to that! We often hear "Oh, honey, look at that cute little one over there"!
Daydream's physical dimensions are modest. Length overall is 25'5". Our beam is 8'6". The vee-berth is 6'4" (I am 5' 8" and Patty is somewhere barely north of 5', so there is plenty of room in the vee-berth for both of us plus the dog!). The cabin interior is 9' long with 6'10" of headroom, with a dinette, galley and enclosed head. The cockpit is 4'8" and we have full canvas, so it can become an extra room when needed. The draft is under 2', which allows us to go many places other boats cannot.
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| C-Dory 25 Cruiser Specifications |
Daydream is powered by a Honda BF150 outboard, and we have added a Honda BF15 kicker. She has a 100 gallon fuel tank, which we usually conservatively count on for 150 nautical miles. The performance specifications from C-Dory are not real world numbers, but performance is not terrible either! In our home waters, at cruising at speed, 16-18 knots, our average economy is 2.0 - 2.2 NMPG, and while slow cruising, 6-8 knots, it is an average of 2.5-3.0 NMPG, sometimes better. Calculating economy as SMPG instead of NMPG, it would be approximately 15% better.
We were talking last week with friends Bob and Betsy Burks, who did much of the Loop several years ago on their C-Dory 25 Cruiser, Sea Pal, and Bob said they had no problem with the stretch from Hoppie's to Green Turtle Bay. Their boat has twin Honda BF90s, which Bob thought were less fuel efficient than a single BF150. We may be overly cautious about gas between Hoppie's and Green Turtle Bay, because we are used to cruising in waters with a lot of winds and tidal currents, which may be on our stern, on our head, or one on the head and the other on the stern, or crosswise! We have never cruised with a 3-4 knot current pushing us for several hundreds miles, and so don't really know how to factor that in.
Daydream came with a 12 volt starting battery and dual 12 volt house batteries wired in parallel that are isolated from the starting battery by a VSR (voltage sensing relay). We have changed out the original house batteries once or twice, and since the current house batteries were about five years old, we just changed them out for the Loop.
We almost never stay at a marina unless it is for a C-Dory gathering. On the Loop, we will no doubt stay at marinas more than we ever have before, but we always look for a good anchorage first. Most of the time in our prior cruising we have anchored (San Juans, Gulf Islands, Desolation Sound, Alaska) or nosed or backed into a sandy beach running lines to shore to secure us (Lake Powell). While the alternator of the BF150 does a good job of charging the batteries on days we are cruising, we sometimes stay several days without moving the boat, and at Lake Powell we did not move the boat for over a week the last time we were there. Everything runs on 12 volt power, so being sure our house batteries are always fully charged, whether or not we have run the engine, is pretty important.
We first added two 100 watt solar panels, originally mounted on the "wings" of the roof so we could carry our dinghy on the rooftop. They actually worked better in the San Juans than at Lake Powell because of the high canyon walls blocking the sun at Lake Powell. Still, I monitored amp hours used and amp hours recovered from the solar panels at Lake Powell with a Victron 700 battery monitor, and we only needed to use the generator once for supplemental charging. The problem with the original location of the panels was that at best only one panel was in the sun, and sometimes neither panel was, so I have recently relocated the solar panels to the flat part of the roof, which should be more efficient.
For supplemental charging when the solar panels don't quite get the house batteries back to a fully charged state, we have a West Marine 30 amp charger powered by a Honda 1000i. I am not sure how a 1000 watt generator can power a 30 amp charger, but it does!
We added a 1000 watt Cobra inverter mounted near the house batteries run to a remote control switch in the cabin and a standard 110 volt outlet below the galley counter, clearly marked as "1000 watt inverter"! This will power the coffee grinder and computer chargers. We also carry a small 400 watt inverter that plugs into a 12 volt socket which can power the coffee grinder if needed.
We have replaced all the interior lights with LED lights, and have an LED anchor light. The Airhead has a 100 milliamp computer fan running continuously. Other loads are charging phones, Kindles, iPad, computers, and our two handheld VHF radios. We know our lighting uses next to no power and the ARB refrigerator/freezer uses the most power. Although we have never analyzed our total power consumption the way many more technical boaters have, at Lake Powell the Victron battery monitor typically said each morning we had used 30 amp hours overnight. I feel reasonably confident we are in pretty good shape for 12 volt power for the Loop!
iNSIDE DAYDREAM'S CABIN
When we took delivery in May 2005, Daydream was equipped with a Wallas diesel ceramic cooktop/heater, a 7 gallon 120 volt hot water tank and a Norcold refrigerator. Since we ordered Daydream at the Seattle Boat Show, and were able to make some modifications during the build, we had the marine head and macerator pump deleted for which we received a credit, which we used to purchase an Airhead composting toilet that I installed.
The Wallas. The Wallas cooktop/heater is a compromise in design from the start. It is neither a very good cooktop nor a very good heater. As a cooktop, it takes too long to heat up and cool down. As a heater, which it becomes when the lid is lowered, it blows the air out at waist height instead of down low so the heat can rise. The big knock, though, is its complexity and propensity to fail, usually in bad circumstances, such as while cruising in Alaska! I have always said that there are two kinds of Wallas owners, those whose Wallas has failed and those whose Wallas is going to fail! We removed the Wallas first.
The water heater. The 7 gallon electric water heater was located on the port side, while the shower and galley faucets were on the starboard side. While it worked fine with shore power or our prior Honda 2000i (we now have a Honda 1000i, because the 2000i was getting too heavy for me to move around), it wasted too much water pushing cold water through the lines to the faucet, so we removed the water heater and reclaimed the space for storage.
The Norcold refrigerator. The Norcold worked well enough, but was a huge power hog. The first two times at Lake Powell, it basically took our house batteries down so far we decided we had to turn it off at night. The place formerly occupied by the Norcold is also now used for storage.
Here is how we dealt with the functions of the Wallas, water heater and Norcold that we removed:
Cooking. We will more than likely cook most of our own meals on-board rather than eat out, so this is a pretty important topic. There was a large hole in the galley counter where the Wallas used to be, so I replaced the entire counter and Patty applied the laminate, and while we were at it, we replaced the sink with one with a better shape and orientation for the new counter.
We usually cook on a one burner butane stove on the counter. I am a little concerned about finding butane canisters in out of the way little towns, and even big cities without Oriental specialty stores! We buy them very cheaply in Oriental grocery stores in Bellingham but those might be few an far between on the Loop! For the Loop we have purchased a nifty little 600/900/1300 watt NuWave induction cooker, which we will run at 1300 watts on shore power and at 600 watts on the Honda 1000i. I thought it might work on the inverter until I did the math - 600 watts divide by 12 volts (not 120 volts - although the inverter is supplying 120 volts the power is coming from 12 volt batteries) equals 50 amps! We also have a Coleman single burner propane stove that we will only use in the cockpit for cooking and for heating water. We also have the mandatory Magma barbecue on a rail in the cockpit!
Hot water. We heat water in a large tea kettle on the propane burner, and dilute it down with cold water to temperature for use for washing dishes in a dishpan or in our Helio shower for showering. This is much less of a burden that it seems! More on the Helio below.
This was a major gain in energy conservation, because it uses less than half the power of the Norcold! It has a freezer compartment, where we keep frozen food and make ice, and a smaller non-freezing section, where we keep cheeses, cured meats and other things requiring refrigeration.
We also have a large Pelican cooler, with big thick walls that keeps things cold a long time, but we are uncertain as to whether we want to bring the Pelican, since it takes up a fair amount of space in a smallish cockpit, and we should be able to reprovision frequently. Still, I am inclined to bring it, since there is a lot of stuff that should be in a cooler, like beer! Patty will be looking for a smaller cooler to save space, even if it is less efficient.
Two additional items relating to life in twenty-five feet:
Water. Not a modification, but since Daydream only has a 20 gallon fresh water tank, we carry an additional 7 gallons in an Aqua-tainer, which has a dispensing spigot and an air vent. This is sort of an emergency backup if we should use all our fresh water before we can take on more water. We also conserve water by washing dishes in either fresh or salt water and giving them a quick fresh water rinse under the tap! If I could make one modification, I would increase the size of the fresh water tank, but it is encased in foam under the vee-berth, and so that project will have to wait for another day.
Showering. The enclosed head has a built in shower but without a hot water heater, it is not particularly useful! We can shower in marina facilities but showering on the hook is pretty important to us. We found a great solution that has proven itself in use in our local cruising waters. It is the Helio Pressure Shower. In its case, it is small and takes up little space. It opens to a two gallon tank with a 7' hose with a shut off and a foot pump to pressurize the tank. Unlike a sun shower, it is not gravity fed. We put a gallon of cold water into the tank, add enough hot water from the tea kettle for a comfortable shower, pressurize with the foot pump, and we are good to go!
DINGHY
We had one of the finest inflatable dinghies available, the Alaska Series by Gary King, that we bought in 2007. At around 50 pounds, it just got to be too much for me to haul up over the bow rail to put on the roof, so we sold it and bought a Sea Eagle FT385 inflatable kayak. We had a chance to try a friend's Sea Eagle, and really liked it. Unlike most kayaks, it is very stable and we can get into it standing up by stepping over the gunwale! The Sea Eagle weighs only 32 pounds, and will be a lot easier to handle getting it up on the roof. We will put a tarp over the solar panels and strap it to the roof when we are cruising.
We are computer nuts, and in addition to the Windows computer running the Coastal Explorer navigation software, which won't be used for anything else, I will have my MacBook Pro and Patty will have her Chromebook for browsing the web and email. When we are not near a WiFi hotspot, we will use our T-Mobile personal hotspots on our iPhones to connect the computers to the Internet. Where there is no T-Mobile cell coverage, we'll just have to tough it out I guess!
There is no TV on Daydream. We both have Kindles for reading, and a Bose SoundLink Mini to which the iPad with all the music on it will be connected via Bluetooth. I think the 4,000 plus tunes on the iPad will be plenty of music for the entire voyage!
Anyway, I am thinking a fair amount of our time on the hook will be devoted to planning the following day or days! I doubt that we will be bored!
FORGOTTEN ANYTHING?
I am pretty sure that once underway we will discover myriad things that we have overlooked. If you see any glaring omission on how we will live on 25 feet around the Loop, please leave a comment!
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| Solar panels on roof |
For supplemental charging when the solar panels don't quite get the house batteries back to a fully charged state, we have a West Marine 30 amp charger powered by a Honda 1000i. I am not sure how a 1000 watt generator can power a 30 amp charger, but it does!
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West Marine 30 amp charger
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The next and most recent modification to the power system was to replace the five year old 12 volt flooded cell house batteries wired in parallel with two East Penn 190 amp hour AGM deep cycle 6 volt batteries wired in series. These are big heavy batteries. I wish we had room for four, but space is at a premium on a twenty-five foot boat!
We added a 1000 watt Cobra inverter mounted near the house batteries run to a remote control switch in the cabin and a standard 110 volt outlet below the galley counter, clearly marked as "1000 watt inverter"! This will power the coffee grinder and computer chargers. We also carry a small 400 watt inverter that plugs into a 12 volt socket which can power the coffee grinder if needed.
We have replaced all the interior lights with LED lights, and have an LED anchor light. The Airhead has a 100 milliamp computer fan running continuously. Other loads are charging phones, Kindles, iPad, computers, and our two handheld VHF radios. We know our lighting uses next to no power and the ARB refrigerator/freezer uses the most power. Although we have never analyzed our total power consumption the way many more technical boaters have, at Lake Powell the Victron battery monitor typically said each morning we had used 30 amp hours overnight. I feel reasonably confident we are in pretty good shape for 12 volt power for the Loop!
When we took delivery in May 2005, Daydream was equipped with a Wallas diesel ceramic cooktop/heater, a 7 gallon 120 volt hot water tank and a Norcold refrigerator. Since we ordered Daydream at the Seattle Boat Show, and were able to make some modifications during the build, we had the marine head and macerator pump deleted for which we received a credit, which we used to purchase an Airhead composting toilet that I installed.
The Wallas. The Wallas cooktop/heater is a compromise in design from the start. It is neither a very good cooktop nor a very good heater. As a cooktop, it takes too long to heat up and cool down. As a heater, which it becomes when the lid is lowered, it blows the air out at waist height instead of down low so the heat can rise. The big knock, though, is its complexity and propensity to fail, usually in bad circumstances, such as while cruising in Alaska! I have always said that there are two kinds of Wallas owners, those whose Wallas has failed and those whose Wallas is going to fail! We removed the Wallas first.
The water heater. The 7 gallon electric water heater was located on the port side, while the shower and galley faucets were on the starboard side. While it worked fine with shore power or our prior Honda 2000i (we now have a Honda 1000i, because the 2000i was getting too heavy for me to move around), it wasted too much water pushing cold water through the lines to the faucet, so we removed the water heater and reclaimed the space for storage.
The Norcold refrigerator. The Norcold worked well enough, but was a huge power hog. The first two times at Lake Powell, it basically took our house batteries down so far we decided we had to turn it off at night. The place formerly occupied by the Norcold is also now used for storage.
Here is how we dealt with the functions of the Wallas, water heater and Norcold that we removed:
Cooking. We will more than likely cook most of our own meals on-board rather than eat out, so this is a pretty important topic. There was a large hole in the galley counter where the Wallas used to be, so I replaced the entire counter and Patty applied the laminate, and while we were at it, we replaced the sink with one with a better shape and orientation for the new counter.
We usually cook on a one burner butane stove on the counter. I am a little concerned about finding butane canisters in out of the way little towns, and even big cities without Oriental specialty stores! We buy them very cheaply in Oriental grocery stores in Bellingham but those might be few an far between on the Loop! For the Loop we have purchased a nifty little 600/900/1300 watt NuWave induction cooker, which we will run at 1300 watts on shore power and at 600 watts on the Honda 1000i. I thought it might work on the inverter until I did the math - 600 watts divide by 12 volts (not 120 volts - although the inverter is supplying 120 volts the power is coming from 12 volt batteries) equals 50 amps! We also have a Coleman single burner propane stove that we will only use in the cockpit for cooking and for heating water. We also have the mandatory Magma barbecue on a rail in the cockpit!
Hot water. We heat water in a large tea kettle on the propane burner, and dilute it down with cold water to temperature for use for washing dishes in a dishpan or in our Helio shower for showering. This is much less of a burden that it seems! More on the Helio below.
Refrigeration. After we removed the Norcold, we bought an ARB 50 quart refrigerator / freezer. I mounted it on a slide out tray under the galley counter, with a pin to keep it in place underway. It runs on either 12 volts or 120 volts, and is wired to the same circuits that formerly powered the Norcold.
This was a major gain in energy conservation, because it uses less than half the power of the Norcold! It has a freezer compartment, where we keep frozen food and make ice, and a smaller non-freezing section, where we keep cheeses, cured meats and other things requiring refrigeration.
We also have a large Pelican cooler, with big thick walls that keeps things cold a long time, but we are uncertain as to whether we want to bring the Pelican, since it takes up a fair amount of space in a smallish cockpit, and we should be able to reprovision frequently. Still, I am inclined to bring it, since there is a lot of stuff that should be in a cooler, like beer! Patty will be looking for a smaller cooler to save space, even if it is less efficient.
Two additional items relating to life in twenty-five feet:
Water. Not a modification, but since Daydream only has a 20 gallon fresh water tank, we carry an additional 7 gallons in an Aqua-tainer, which has a dispensing spigot and an air vent. This is sort of an emergency backup if we should use all our fresh water before we can take on more water. We also conserve water by washing dishes in either fresh or salt water and giving them a quick fresh water rinse under the tap! If I could make one modification, I would increase the size of the fresh water tank, but it is encased in foam under the vee-berth, and so that project will have to wait for another day.
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| Aqua-tainer |
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| Helio shower in case |
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| Helio shower ready to use |
DINGHY
We had one of the finest inflatable dinghies available, the Alaska Series by Gary King, that we bought in 2007. At around 50 pounds, it just got to be too much for me to haul up over the bow rail to put on the roof, so we sold it and bought a Sea Eagle FT385 inflatable kayak. We had a chance to try a friend's Sea Eagle, and really liked it. Unlike most kayaks, it is very stable and we can get into it standing up by stepping over the gunwale! The Sea Eagle weighs only 32 pounds, and will be a lot easier to handle getting it up on the roof. We will put a tarp over the solar panels and strap it to the roof when we are cruising.
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| Sea Eagle inflatable kayak |
ENTERTAINMENT
We are computer nuts, and in addition to the Windows computer running the Coastal Explorer navigation software, which won't be used for anything else, I will have my MacBook Pro and Patty will have her Chromebook for browsing the web and email. When we are not near a WiFi hotspot, we will use our T-Mobile personal hotspots on our iPhones to connect the computers to the Internet. Where there is no T-Mobile cell coverage, we'll just have to tough it out I guess!
There is no TV on Daydream. We both have Kindles for reading, and a Bose SoundLink Mini to which the iPad with all the music on it will be connected via Bluetooth. I think the 4,000 plus tunes on the iPad will be plenty of music for the entire voyage!
Anyway, I am thinking a fair amount of our time on the hook will be devoted to planning the following day or days! I doubt that we will be bored!
FORGOTTEN ANYTHING?
I am pretty sure that once underway we will discover myriad things that we have overlooked. If you see any glaring omission on how we will live on 25 feet around the Loop, please leave a comment!
You've put some great and useful information in your blog. Thanks. We are slowly but surely making modifications to our Marinette 32 to prepare it for long distance cruising on the loop. We currently do not have an inverter system, but plan to add that this Spring. I am also considering eliminating our head/tank/macerator and going with a composting toilet. This would allow us to add fresh water holding capacity. Do you have any advice/suggestions regarding composting toilets? I will look forward to following you on your journey!
ReplyDeleteWe have an Airhead that we bought in 2005. If I were to replace it, I would go with Nature's Head, http://store.natureshead.net. I think it has a better design, although in functionality our Airhead probably works as well.
DeleteHi Pat!
ReplyDeleteGreat Blog! Keep it up. Barb and I want to follow you as you experience this great adventure. I looked at your an earlier post on the satellite images. The Diversion Channel on the Mississippi. The is the exact channel we used. It was plenty deep for our C-Dory. We put the bow on the bank opposite the boat ramp (just like we do sometimes at Powell) and then hiked up to the gas station nearby. You can also "beach" your boat right next to the ramp if you are going to have someone deliver gas to you. You should be fine then to make it up to Green Turtle Bay. Barb and I don't have our boating plans finalized but hope we can meet up with you and Patty sometime along the way. Like the nav system you put together and the "new" mounting of the solar panels. Can you put some more pictures of the solar mounting on the C-Brats site? Looks like you can remove it when you want.
Scott & Barb "Little Bit"
Regarding your charger and generator, 30A @13.8VDC is 414W. So including some electrical inefficiencies you are only drawing between 450-500W depending on how efficient the charger is. Thanks for blogging!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this amazing article on Daydream's Great Loop was Just searching for 5 BASIC TYPES OF ROOFING MATERIALS and found this amazing website of yours.
ReplyDelete