A needful Puerto Rico read, some roller coaster finality, and in the “when it’s time to get out of Dodge” department…
So, here’s a thought on how we (the cruising collective) tend to deal with the various problems/issues/conundrums that make our lives complicated like power aboard, the need to be connected, and budget.
As it happens, in the right here and now, I’m wrestling with all three of those and it’s not exactly happy making. For instance, everyone seems to need more power (a convection oven and air fryer would be nice), unlimited connections (how can one survive without 24/7 NetFlix?) and how am I supposed to afford all the stuff?
Where the power is concerned, I’m almost maxed out with semi-orientable solar but still finding I want more. Same goes for being connected. Having a internet-based income stream, the whole being able to email and use the internet is fairly important to the aforementioned budget. The standard response to all sailing/cruising problems of this sort is to just spend more money, and in this case might go something like this…
Switch to lithium, add a genset, and buy a Starlink dish.
Simple right?
Well, except the part where it fucks up the budget beyond help. That said, apparently, if you don’t consider a $20K outlay to fix these problems you really should not be cruising at all. So, what’s a poor boy gonna to do in these hard times?
The simple answer to the conundrum is to simply go with less instead of more…
In our case, a bit more solar combined with a bit less power consumption pretty much sorts that issue out. On the being connected front, using something like the inReach messenger for trans-oceanic passages combined with phone-based internet is really all we need. The whole idea of me buying anything from Musk is just not going to happen and that pretty much seals the deal.
Maybe, we’d all be a lot happier with our budgets if we just started with cutting back rather than buying something in knee jerk mode. In our case, we consider the good old days was when we were crossing oceans with zip in the way of bells and whistles.