After my last anchor alarm stopped sending remote alarm notifications, I got on a mission to find the best replacement and after the last month of testing I have settled on Anchor Alarm Pro as the winner.
It had 90% of the features I required, was free and after a few messages to the developer, it now had 100% of the features I wanted.
I sent feedback messages to most other apps and never got any responces although I do think EH Anchor Alarm deserves a honourable mention.
Thanks! We’re doing everything: refit, repair, rearrange the interior, repaint, refinish the entire interior, re-powering (dial in our electric drive conversion), rewiring (full replacement), re-plumbing (full replacement), re-rigging, re-coring the deck, build a new rudder… you get the idea. We’re currently on the hard, but going to stop lighting money on fire in the boatyard while we wait for new sails and a rigger (2-year lead time).
2 year lead time?!? Wth! Sails usually took about 4 months for me but now I really want to contact the rigging shop where I’m spending the winter to see what kind of wait to expect.
That’s a massive refit wow! Most of those items I’ll also be doing before an Atlantic crossing but luckily my 45 year old deck is still dry and the original rudder molds still exist. Next spendy items on my list are an enclosed dodger, wind vane and stripping off the VC17 and redoing the epoxy layer + bottom paint.
What did you do for the electric drive? Hopefully not something like on the Theros with old Nissan leaf batteries…
Port Townsend Sails (formerly Carol Hasse sails) are all custom with serious lead time. I didn’t think it was worth the money and wait until I delivered a sailboat with PT Sails to Hawaii. “Oh, that’s where the money went.” I’d put them even with Schattauer Sails for cruising cloth. My boat came with a full complement of 20 year old Schattauer sails with most of it offshore cruising. While the fabric and stitching were still mostly good, there was enough stretch to noticeably impact light wind performance.
Sounds like you have a refit project yourself! What vane are you going with?
Our electric drive is a QuietTorque 30.0 LC (48V) which replaced a Lehman 2412. It is more than plentiful for all of our use cases (and then some), but switching to electric dropped enough weight out of the boat to make it frustratingly tender (we’re about 5000 pounds underweight after the first round of changes). Even with upcoming additions, we’re probably going to put another 2500 pounds of lead in the keel (there’s room for it) plus some trim ingots.
I built my own banks with Fortune 100Ah LFP cells, 16s in 8 discrete banks, BMS per bank with cell-level balancing. We’re also going with an all-electric galley. With the re-arranging of the interior, space opened up by not having huge fuel tanks, eliminating and recovering almost all dead space, we now have more room for another 8 banks. And then some. That will bring us to 76kWh of angry pixies, plus another 730Wh in the 12V house bank. On the 800Ah banks, we could putt along at 3kt in calm water for ~90 hours, max throttle (>hull speed) for 2 hours.
I had Doyle sails in Halifax make my new mainsail and stack pack. (sooooo worth it as a solo sailor omg) They did fantastic work and knowing I can get warranty repairs done all over the world is a good bonus. After sailing with a 40yo main and 20yo genoa the boat felt brand new with an unused and well stored 40yo 100% Genoa (for $500cad!) and putting on the new mainsail woah.
And yeah haha the boat is gonna be in a perpetual refit as I get more money to spend on it. I’ll go with the Cape Horn wind vane since they’re made near me, are internally mounted and can be ordered to be taller than my solar panels. Plus it supports using a tiller pilot mounted to the wind vane control rod so that way you can steer to a heading with nearly zero power draw as the steering power comes from the wind vane rudder.
Switching to electric is def something I’d consider although I may go with a hybrid system like they did on Tally-Ho. The regen feature would be amazing but in the meantime my 2012 yanmar will do and I can save up for a seawing towed hydrogenerator as it is the only option I can find that is designed from scratch to work between 3-6 knots.
Your battery setup puts my 400ah 12v house bank to shame hahaha You’re charging off regen and solar I assume?
The most Wh comes from regen under sail. We’re seeing about <2.0% hit on SOG when we turn on regen. Right now only 600W of solar panels. Even in the PacNW, our needs have been well-met year-round.