Some of the winter work can be done at the desk in the home office. In this case I have designed a means of giving us an "almost" hard doger and more solar power to the house bank.

First, we already have an extremely strong 2" aluminium pipe arch that straddles the aft most part of the cabin roof. It holds the 300W solar pannel that currently charges the house bank. The only problem with NELLEKE is that as a ketch there is almost always a boom shading some part of the pannel. We also carry smaller 30W pannels on top of the bimini to trickle charge the cranking bank - same problem with the mizzen boom. My solution is to remove the pannels from the bimini and place them vertically on the port and startboard sides of the arch over the cabin. One side of the boat or the other will almost always have some sun on it and that means that we will have a trickle charge to the cranking bank any time during daylight. The side support will also give us a place to put the final set of smallest solar pannels that are intended to trickle charge the cranking bank for the generator. This will also free the top of the bimini for another larger solar pannel to maintain the charge on the house bank.

There will be andadditional side benefit - the companionway will be covered on the top and sides - hence the almost hard dodger statement. At some time in the future we may even consider putting a soft dodger on the forward side of the arch and complete the cycle.

11/22/2007 11:26:12

Nelleke has a lot of solar pannels. We have a 170W pannel to charge the house bank, a 60W pannel to charge the Perkins cranking bank and a 15W pannel to trickle charge the cranking bank for the generator. The big challenge has been to locate them and at the same time keep them out of the way and not in any place that they could be stepped upon or otherwise broken. The house bank pannel is on an arch over the aft part of the pilot house, the cranking bank pannels are on the bimini and the generator cranking bank pannels are on the top of the cabin.

Add to that our need for more power to the house bank and our idea that we would like to have some sort of hard dodger shelter over the companionway and we have another project.