With Alisios Sailing in Las Palmas I have found a good partner to equip the SAVITA for the crossing. I am planning to glue some of these thin flexible solar panels to the hard top and to get a Watt&Sea hydrogenerator to have sufficient electricity available without running the generator several times a day. When the radar is on the SAVITA uses over 20 Amperes of energy also running the autopilot, 2 fridges and 2 of the 3 chartplotters. This equals 240 watts of power and brings the batteries down to 50% in half a day, so good electric supply is essential. I will also add more batteries, hoping that after a sunny day the systems will get over the night without running the hydrogenerator. On the other side the hydrogenerator can deliver over 600 watts giving us enough electricity for cloudy days.

For online communication outside WIFI and GSM areas a satelite communication system is planned. Iridium has finished the launch of their new Iridium Next satelites. With this new network data speed is now good for online communication and device size has decreased to a level that is great for mast installation.

The defects have been reported to the boat vendor Yachten Meltl in Germany. They are in contact with Nautitech to find a solution.

All side hatches let some water in when the boat is sailed in heavy waves. It's not very much, but definitely more than one would expect on a new boat. As all 6 hatches are leaky it must be a general problem of the used hatch type und thus finding a solution might be difficult.

When running the generator to produce electricity the charge controller must reduce the battery loading speed to avoid heating up the batteries.

It starts loading with nice 48 A at 70% of battery.

But after a few minutes of loading the charge controller quickly reduces the charging current only 5 A. With this current the charging of the batteries would take all night. Rebooting the board electronics makes the charging current go up to 48 A again which clearly shows that this is a failure in the loading logic.

The core problem of the boat still is the integration of battery, water, diesel, pumps and lights control in the chart plotter with a software extension to the B&G chartplotter software named Naviop. By now I have seen 3 classes of problems: Freezing of the chart plotter, crashing of the chart plotter and freezing of the chart plotter with automatic reboot. While the first two classes are very annoying the third one is outright dangerous as it randomly stops the autopilot without any warning.

In my opinion the only way to solve this problem is to remove the Naviop software from the chartplotters and instead having separate gauges and switches to control the board electronics. The B&G chartplotters should run only the original software they are delivered with and no boat specific extension. I have proposed this solution to the vendor Yachten Meltl and they are discussing it with Nautitech. As this is the third time they try to solve the problem it is according to German law their last chance to find a solution.

Here's a rough idea about our sailing plans for the next months:

• June-September 2019: Equipment changes and defect fixing, Island hopping on the canaries
• October 2019: Cape verde Islands
• November 2019: Caribbean
• January 2020: Panama
• February 2020: Galapagos