Our Solar Panels Connected to the... Dinghy Davits! (Friday - April 30, 2010)

This post is for TOCK owner Hull #6 (aka Mike)... and for any other future cruiser that might want to watch a movie, grind up some coffee beans, and most importantly... drink an icy cold beverage out of the fridge... as the fridge is the main power hog!

We have had two vessels with solar panels. ‘Windfall’ had a sugar-scoop transom. We had discussed dinghy davits, but couldn’t engineer them in a way where they wouldn’t interfere with getting on and off the boat. We achieved maximum solar production by setting the panels on top of the bimini instead. And to get the dinghy on the boat (as we rarely towed her behind us because of the extreme pressure the force put on the D-rings AND the fact that it slowed us way down) we took the outboard off and then flipped the dinghy upside down on the bow... inflated. It served as an emergency life boat. We opted to go with a light-weight 80 lb. dinghy (Avon 8.5' ribbed w/ folding transom) and a Mercury 2-stroke 15HP outboard: lighter than a 4-stroke and easier to repair if it gets dunked.

‘Hotspur’ came with dinghy davits when we bought her and I must say that we all did a little jig! We have cruiser friends all over who have dinghy davits and we see the blessed ease of lifting the dinghy in and out of the water via pulley system. In fact, our friend Jessie on ‘Francis Lee’ is hauled out beside us and one improvement on his agenda is to have dinghy davits installed on his 36' Cheoy Lee. And, of course, hauling your dinghy around like this while tootling around the Sea of Cortez or short stints here and there in good sea conditions is fine, but if we were making a long ocean passage Jim and I would NOT haul our dinghy in this fashion in case a large wave filled the dinghy with water and tore it off.

We considered putting the solar panels on the dodger on ‘Hotspur’, but the boom from the mainsail is in the way, shading the panels and possibly damaging them if they crash together. We’ve seen panels mounted on the foredeck and we don’t like that idea because if you need to step there to work the lines you can’t. The only other place we would have considered mounting our solar panels on ‘Hotspur’ would have been on the port and starboard sides aft. However, the aluminum dinghy davits are very solid and mounting the panels there allows us to tilt them forward or aft... getting maximum power as the sun moves... a bonus! There is very little to shade the panels when placed this far aft as well. All we needed was mounting hardware... which we had custom built here in Mazatlan out of stainless since we couldn’t find any aluminum that wasn’t strictly industrial looking. We put plastic spacers between the aluminum and steel to help reduce galvanic corrosion between the two dissimilar metals. We’re very happy with the results, so far!