The Everglades Adventure

As we continue to make Homerun liveable, we are also preparing for a 2 to 3 week trip to the Florida Everglades to do some nature photography. We were planning to depart between the end of February but the weather is holding at this stage. The wind has been blowing out of the north for a number of days now and as soon as it changes to anything other than the north we will be off. We will be stopping off at Lake Ingraham and then plan to concentrate on an area called Whitewater Bay.

Loading the boat with 3 weeks worth of food and water takes some planning as it is really easy to overload a catamaran and make it sluggish at best and dangerous in rough water. One thing we are doing in our Seawind 24 to keep the weight down is installing lightweight net hammocks for stowage instead of shelves or other heavier wood structures. The hammocks allow airflow to prevent mildew, and nothing falls out while sailing. We made them with leftover net from our trampoline.

Net hammock for storage aboard our Seawind 24

  I was asked to elaborate a bit on our electrical system. It was non-existent when we arrived here at Boot Key Harbor and so we had to design it from scratch. We want to keep the boat simple with as little maintenance as possible and this goes for the electrical as well. So far we only have power in the right hull which is used for our computers, a depth sounder, and for charging batteries for our various electronic devices, and our nav lights. The nav lights are portable LED lights and mostly stowed away as we do not intend sailing much at night. They are lightweight and should they be needed the batteries last 3+ days continuously so nothing to worry about there. In the left hull we have two portable lights one of which is solar charged directly and the other has rechargeable batteries - all LED. The whole system is charged by a 30 watt solar panel and stored in a 79 amp/hr battery.


The electrical panel - 7 amp controller, 400 watt inverter, & 2 12v outlets.
 

Next: The first leg of the Everglades Adventure............