Salty Podcast #60 |⛵One Sailor’s Jeanneau 419 Upgrades🔧

Rich Whitlock (@rich_whitlock9603) shares the smart upgrades he’s made to his 2018 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 419—from ☀️ solar and 📡 Starlink to 🧭 chartplotters & more.  Whether you're refitting your cruiser or dreaming of the liveaboard life, this episode is packed with tips and gear talk you don’t want to miss.

Ever wondered what happens when submarine engineering meets modern sailing? Rich Whitlock, a former nuclear submarine officer with a mechanical engineering background, takes us deep into the technical transformation of his 2018 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 419.

From bow to stern, Rich breaks down his methodical approach to boat systems, starting with his 55-pound Rakhna spade anchor upgrade that provides unmatched holding power. His communication and navigation setup—featuring radar with custom alarms, AIS-receiving VHF, and advanced sonar imaging—creates multiple safety layers for solo offshore passages.

The heart of Rich's sailing philosophy revolves around power independence. He walks us through his lithium battery conversion that increased capacity by 70% while reducing weight, paired with an intelligent 700-watt solar array using specialized SIGs panels that perform remarkably well even in partial shade. The pure sine wave inverter running his coffee maker, laptop, and surprisingly efficient air fryer showcases how cruising comfort doesn't have to sacrifice energy consciousness.

What truly sets Rich's approach apart is his submarine-influenced redundancy strategy. Three different outboards, multiple dinghies, portable generators, and even a battery-powered air conditioner ensure he's never without options when plans change. His recent eight-day, 1,300-mile solo passage from the Bahamas to Saint Martin demonstrates how these systems function together in real-world conditions.

Whether you're planning your own extensive refit or simply curious about maximizing your boat's capabilities, Rich's blend of technical expertise and practical experience offers a fascinating roadmap to modern, self-sufficient cruising. His journey proves that with methodical planning and the right equipment, sailors can extend their range and comfort while maintaining robust safety systems for offshore adventures.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Guest Background
• 9:04 Anchor Systems and Safety Equipment
• 14:53 Radar Installation and Communication Systems
• 22:56 Battery Monitoring and Lithium Upgrades
• 37:16 Inverter Systems and Creature Comforts
• 51:02 Solar Setup and Installation Strategy
• 1:02:12 Portable Generator Solutions
• 1:08:22 Starlink and Connectivity at Sea
• 1:17:42 Dinghy Options and Outboard Motors
• 1:20:45 Navigation Technology and Sonar Systems

Transcript

Capn Tinsley: 0:00

If you're a sailboat systems junkie or marine tech enthusiast, this one's for you. Tonight, I'm joined by Rich Whitlock and we're diving into how he transformed his 2018 Genoa Sun Odyssey 419 into a fully equipped cruising machine Solar Starlink, upgraded nav systems, you name it, we're talking about it. Whether you're planning your own refit or just love hearing how other sailors set up their boats, you're going to get a ton out of this episode. But first, please like, share, subscribe, especially with other sailboat geeks. Please share the video and let us know what upgrade you'd never leave the dock without. Uh, I'm captain tinsley of sailing vessel salty, abandoned and 98 island packet 320, and this is the salty podcast episode 60, so let's get into it. Welcome, rich thank you.

Rich Whitlock: 0:52

Thank you so much for having me.

Capn Tinsley: 0:53

It's my pleasure to be here oh, you're doing the, the, the sound thing again oh, is it not giving you not? Yeah, did it come unplugged or something? Can't hear you now. Oh, your mic's off. Okay, your mic's off. We're going to get through it, sorry how about now?

Capn Tinsley: 1:16

Well, you're still kind of making that crackly noise. That's a shame. Okay, turn your mic on. How about now? Can you hear me? Sorta anybody's out there listen. Let us know if he sounds crackly or not, is it? Maybe it's just on my end, but let's, let's try to get through it and we'll see what. There are a few people watching already. So, uh, if you're watching out there, please tell us if uh rich has got a crackly voice right now, or if it's just me, if I'm crazy so go ahead and tell us.

Rich Whitlock: 1:56

I hear you just fine, so it must just be me, but hopefully it's not too bad um, okay, so tell us where their boat is and where you are right now.

Rich Whitlock: 2:06

Sure, I live in Dallas, texas, but I keep my boat in St Martin in the Northeast corner of the Caribbean, and the reason I keep it there? I used to keep it in the Bahamas for a few months, but I moved it there, really because of Hayden and Radine. From there we go Island Spirit. Yeah, hi guys, I just wanted to say thank you. It was a podcast that you did a while back where they were talking about I think it was the thorny path on how to get basically from Florida all the way out to the Caribbean, and one of the things that they mentioned was, you know, all the different islands and things that they liked about them, and they really seemed to like saint martin. So, um, it took me a little while to get the boat there because you have to wait. Uh, there's either two ways to go there. Uh, you can either take the thorny path, which is kind of you go straight there and kind of island hop from island to island. That takes forever.

Capn Tinsley: 2:56

Um, I can see that you're having like you're not being able to hear me and I apologize for that I can hear you now now, cause everybody was saying they that we both sounded good, so it's a problem on my end.

Rich Whitlock: 3:07

Okay, cause I can hear you just fine.

Capn Tinsley: 3:09

Yeah, okay, and now I can hear you, oh, wonderful.

Rich Whitlock: 3:12

Wonderful.

Capn Tinsley: 3:13

Okay, so so, um right, he heard what you said. I did not smart move pushing to X, s, x, m, great job.

Rich Whitlock: 3:21

Very kind and and on my introductory screen I sort of show the little path that I took and I'll talk about that in a second, but just a little bit by way of background, because some of the things that I talk are highly technical and that's just sort of due to my upbringing. Just by way of background. Real quick, I read the Hunt for Red October when I was in the eighth grade and I was like God put me on this planet to be a submarine captain. So I enlisted in the navy for a year and then, I'm pretty sure due to a computer virus, I got picked up for the naval academy. So I went there for four years I studied mechanical and nuclear engineering. I served on a fast attack nuclear submarine based out of Pearl Harbor, hawaii, for three years, which was pretty cool. But I missed the cold war and so I got out somehow got into Columbia University, went there for my and I'm in my current career field of turnaround management, financial restructuring.

Rich Whitlock: 4:07

I kind of rediscovered my love of sailing about eight years ago. I used to think that and I still do like those old sailing frigates, like those 50, 74 gun, like man o' war sailing vessels, I used to slug it out back in the day, I used to think those were some of the coolest pieces of just engineering that mankind has ever made, and so having like my own little sailboat is sort of like the closest thing I can get to that Right. But I sort of look at everything from an engineering perspective when it comes to a lot of these upgrades. So that's why I sort of put a lot of like thought and science into them. Okay, I was more than happy to talk about some of them and the rationale.

Capn Tinsley: 4:41

Are you ready for me to bring out the first slide?

Rich Whitlock: 4:50

Yes, ma'am, okay, so that's. That's siri or cirilla. I named her after the witcher, the daughter in the witcher series, um, so that that picture that you see there, that's actually a picture of her taken from in warderick wells, which is one of the most beautiful places on earth, I believe next to staniel key as well okay um, and that's their layout at the top right.

Rich Whitlock: 5:04

So it's just a traditional sort of three cabin. They come in different configurations but you know, v-berth, at the front, forward head, sort of a main salon table, two little tables at a nav station. Off to the port side the main bathroom is, you know, on the port side, with two staterooms in the back and you don't really see it on here. But I've turned the inboard half of the aft port stateroom into sort of like a storage locker. So that's where I keep like a lot of this equipment that you'll see, that we talk about, like some of the outboard, like the electric outboard and the little dinghy and stuff like that kind of all get shoved in there. So it's sort of like a two and a half bedroom, if you will.

Rich Whitlock: 5:43

But at the bottom right that's my little Garmin GPS tracker and essentially that shows the path that I did recently. It took me eight days to get from the Bahamas to St Martin and, as you know, the trade winds blow sort of east, southeast and so you're going right into them and it's a disaster. So you have to wait for the winds to shift and there was a period where three days where the winds were blowing basically from the east, southeast, which allowed me to kind of go northeast, and then they shifted to the, basically to come from the east, northeast, and that allowed me to kind of do that diagonal down to St Martin. So that trip was 1,300 miles by myself, 600 miles offshore max, and took me eight days.

Rich Whitlock: 6:23

So okay that was pretty cool. That's how I got my boat to saint martin, and I was able to work the whole time too, thanks to starlink you were able to work the whole time and it's done too, because some of the like, if you're going to work on a boat, you want to work when the weather's like nasty out and rainy and you're not missing anything. If it's like perfect and sunny, that you're just like. But life could be worse.

Capn Tinsley: 6:44

Let's be honest right, but it's hard to work on a computer when the boat's moving around too much. Yes, luckily.

Rich Whitlock: 6:50

Luckily like that, like siri took it like a champ and I was kind of like tilted over, like doing this for hours on it. But it does you.

Capn Tinsley: 6:58

You get you suffer through that's right, your boat is a lot bigger. That's good, okay, so let's go to the next one.

Rich Whitlock: 7:04

So I'm just talking about anchors yes, ma'am, so in no particular order, I'm just going to kind of go mentally from bow to stern. Um, my boat I one of the. It was literally one of the first things I did. I bought it from island water world. I bought my boat in st lucia and I sailed it basically up to mobile bay, alabama, and then to the bahamas, then to houston. Logging story short, it was literally one of the first thing that I bought was an upgraded anchor, so it was a 44 pound.

Rich Whitlock: 7:28

The stock anchor on a lot of these boats is like a 44 pound but it's a CQR, it's kind of like what they call the plow anchor, and the problem with that anchor is that under heavy strain it literally turns into a plow, like an oxen going through a field. It will literally just carve a trough like through the bottom of the ocean. And the bruce is a little bit better. That's the one that looks like the big claw and the danforth. Everybody knows that's got the big flukes and stuff on it, but that one's really only good for like sand and mud and soft bottoms. So those are kind of the first generation anchors, the second generation anchors. This is one of the ones I upgraded to and you see the picture of the Rakhna on the bottom right. These are called kind of spade anchors and what they do is their design. They have a sharp point but instead of like a plow that pushes the sediment the bottom to the side, this one the harder you pull on it, the more it digs in. And some of these anchors have held so well in hurricanes they've buried themselves like three feet down and it takes a while to like un-dig it. They're relentless. So that's why they're kind of called second generation.

Rich Whitlock: 8:32

Mantis and rachna are kind of the two largest competitors in this arena and you can see there they have a little table, an anchor sizing table there, and essentially I kind of pretty much try to get the biggest one that I could. So it's. The recommendation was a 55 pound anchor for based on the boat's weight. So I have 17,000 pounds, up to 20,000 pounds for a storm, which is that third column. It recommends a 55 pound anchor but based on length it recommends a 65. I really I came within an inch of buying the 85 pound but I wasn't sure it would physically fit in the anchor holder. So I've never had this anchor drag. It's been amazing.

Rich Whitlock: 9:13

And one other thing I wanted to say about this is don't forget to use a snubber. So at the bottom left picture you can kind of see a sailboat with an anchor snubber on and the snubber are the two red lines there. You always want to kind of have that going to your cleats. A lot of people, they'd never use it and so basically the anchor chain just goes straight to their windlass and the windlass essentially takes the strain of that anchor. And if you're at lunch it's no big deal, but if that thing's blowing you do not want that.

Rich Whitlock: 9:40

That ankle windlass is not designed to withstand basically like 10,000 pounds of force on it. So you use the snubber and you put that force on the cleats, which is where it's designed for. And the other thing that's cool about the snubber is you see that big U shape, that sag. You want that sag in there because that essentially helps lower the chain down into the water more fully and that lets the anchor get a bigger bite. So at night I always make sure to use the snubber. Even though it's kind of a pain to to deploy, it's well worth it. It just helps me sleep at night. So, okay, that's pretty much it for the anchor. Um, someone once said you have the right sized anchor when people look at it and laugh because it's so ridiculously okay so, if nothing else, use that tip of the day so the first thing I literally had installed my boat was a radar.

Rich Whitlock: 10:26

I had the, the boatyard do it, where I bought it, um, and you can kind of see it up there above the tricolor and I'm flying the french courtesy flag because my boat's on the north, uh, french side of saint martin, um, but this is the radar super critical for night sailing, um, I believe. And it's also and I kind of love that image in the bottom right Because that's what it looks like if you're going into like a little bay or something at night, like Simpson Bay, you can kind of go in there, or Marigo sorry, marigo, that's what it looked like at night, except there were literally hundreds of vessels all throughout. And if it's at night, and especially if there's like backlit, like where there's lights on land and it's hard to see anchor lights, believe it or not, like in that kind of thing, the radar really helps you pick things out. But really the radar is the only reason that allows me to really sleep at night on the boat if I'm on a passage, if I'm going from A to B, because you can set up alarms. I have two different alarms One looks out to the front and one looks in 360 degrees and essentially the front one's further. But essentially if it encounters a vessel or any object on the water, it'll basically wake me up, and same thing for somebody's coming up behind me and they get too close it'll wake me up as well.

Rich Whitlock: 11:41

It's also really handy for oil rigs. If you're ever in the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes when they shut down a rig and abandon it, there won't be a light on it. Sometimes they'll put a whistle on it, but the whistle only works if it's moving up and down. That's what kind of powers it. So oil rigs in the Gulf is key and, like I said, the crowded anchorages at night. So the radar is really important, especially if you're singlehanding, because then obviously at some point you have to sleep. So the radar sort of acts as your, your crew member for your lookout, if you will and do you have ais as well?

Rich Whitlock: 12:09

so I that's one of the slides. I have ais received, but I do not have ais transmit okay um, and that's the. Originally I wanted that because of power, because I didn't want, like, there to be a huge power draw on the boat although now that I've upgraded my batteries I'm not sure it matters that much. I just know to transmit ais requires essentially more stuff than it than it does to receive it yeah, yeah, I've got both.

Capn Tinsley: 12:34

I use the ais way more and I know I know exactly what you're talking about, because not every boat has ais, so, um, but I think there's more and more.

Rich Whitlock: 12:43

Yes, for sure that have them.

Capn Tinsley: 12:45

And I do transmit. So that is nice, mm-hmm.

Rich Whitlock: 12:52

Okay, so this is one of my personal. I think I have like four favorite upgrades on the boat. This is like, definitely towards the top, and I recommend this radio strongly to anybody. So this is a standard Horizon GX2400. Recommend this radio strongly to anybody. So this is a standard horizon GX 2400.

Rich Whitlock: 13:07

And so if you don't want to have a AIS, basically transmit radio which also will allow you to receive. This is basically the best radio that I found that allows you to receive, because it's under $400. Just about every one of these competitors is in the seven $800 range, but for some reason, standard horizon figured out how to make this under $400. The other cool thing so it receives AIS is the big thing. The other really neat thing is that it has a NMEA 2000 or SeaTalk NG connector on the back so it can plug into your NMEA 2000 network, and so what it allows you to do is it allows you to see your AIS targets on the chart plotter, which is really really, really cool.

Rich Whitlock: 13:41

Sure, and the neatest thing is and when I bought my boat, I was having trouble catching AIS targets at more than like five miles and I was like something's wrong with this. So it was either the cabling or the antenna. I said, well, let me try to change out the antenna first. So I bought a new VHF antenna and digital antenna apparently makes some of the best. So I got that. And it was just night and day. All of a sudden you start picking ais stuff up at you know 25 miles. When I was on the ocean sailing from the bahamas to saint martin, I picked up a cargo ship at 60 miles on. Wow, yeah, it was because the mast is so high and they were so high. It just went right over the horizon. It was beautiful. And then I have like a little remote mic that I installed in the cockpit. That way you know you can hear. You don't have to run downstairs every time you hear the radio light up, you can actually hear it.

Capn Tinsley: 14:31

Yeah, it's a game changer.

Rich Whitlock: 14:32

Oh for sure, yeah, but anyway, I highly recommend this radio. It's the same price as one without it. Just, I highly recommend it. So this is the battery monitor. This is one of my other favorite upgrades. This is one of. This was probably the third upgrade I installed on the boat. It's a Sly Marine Pico. There's different ones, I think Victron makes one.

Rich Whitlock: 14:51

I just really liked the layout of this one. It essentially allows you to monitor the battery, but and you so you can see here in the top, in the top right, that's an actual picture that I took. So the battery was at 72%. Time basically remaining to charge was seven hours, 56 minutes. Voltage was 13.5 and the current, if it's blue, that means you're charging, and if it's basically orange, that means you're just charging. And if it reds, that red is like you're really discharging that thing. Yeah, but that 30 amps that you see there, it's charging. That was completely based off solar um. So I get all the key battery statistics.

Rich Whitlock: 15:25

And also, when you're at night and you're just running off your battery, that time to discharge, sort of if you see it being like three days, that really helps my brain sleep at night because I know that I'm not going to run out of battery, like in the middle of the night or something like that bottom left picture. There that's like the full kit that includes the tank sensors as well as like some of the individual small shunts and you can kind of see in the bottom right there they put up an example where you're monitoring your your light current, draw your refrigerator current, draw your instruments and then you know you're charging. I just have one shunt that monitors my total net in and out. So it's so.

Rich Whitlock: 16:03

I didn't need a lot of that equipment in the bottom left. I needed three things. The thing is, if you have lithium batteries, you absolutely, absolutely need a status of charge indicator, something that monitors the amps in and the amps out, because the old method of doing it, where you kind of look at your voltage and, based on your current draw, you can kind of tell where the charge is, that doesn't work for lithium batteries because they maintain the voltage so well. So I love this little thing. It has an app you can like, connect it to Wi-Fi and stuff. I've just never bothered.

Capn Tinsley: 16:32

Mine's all Victron. I think you've got some Victron in here somewhere.

Rich Whitlock: 16:36

Yes, ma'am, I have a few Victron things. So one of the upgrades that I did is, only like a year ago I replaced the batteries. I had four AGM batteries that were 350 amp hours with 140 amp hour each lithium ion phosphate, so it was like a 70% increase in capacity and the batteries were so light that I literally thought I needed to fill them with something. When I picked them up, they were unbelievable and I got a great deal on them. I got them on Amazon for like $230.

Rich Whitlock: 17:04

But the important thing when you talk about lithium batteries is you want to make sure it has what's called an internal BMS or battery management system. And when lithium batteries first came out, it was literally just the batteries and you needed all this special charging equipment to make sure that you know, like a DC to DC converter and all this other kind of stuff to make sure that you didn't overcharge the battery. Because I just look on youtube there's lithium battery burning down boats left and right, not to mention like cars and stuff. But the internal battery monitoring system. The beauty about this is that it I didn't need to change any of my charging equipment. It was literally just completely plug and play because the battery management system a lot controls the charge, and when it gets up to a sufficient level it slows down the charge rate and then it just refuses to accept the charge. And when it gets up to a sufficient level it slows down the charge rate and then it just refuses to accept the charge anymore. So you can't basically burn out the battery. It's fully congruent with all your charging equipment.

Rich Whitlock: 17:55

I did mention, though it will give your alternator a workout. So the normal battery charge, the way it works, is, you know, you kind of have the, and you can see in the bottom left there, excuse me, in the bottom right, you've got your three stages bulk, absorption and float. And bulk is when it's just absorbing as much energy as it can. But the way a normal battery works is once you basically hit a certain volt it's like 14.1, depends on the battery, but it's over 14 volts the battery will start accepting a less and less of a rate of a charge, and that's because it's getting fuller and fuller. So it gives your alternator a break because it's no longer going at full capacity and it sort of like winds it down gently. The way the lithiums work is, it's beautiful because the bulk lasts so much longer. The problem with that is that your battery, your alternator, is running at 60 amps, or whatever its rating is for like a much longer time. Um, I sort of look at that as both a good and a bad thing.

Capn Tinsley: 18:48

Okay.

Rich Whitlock: 18:49

I had something else on there. I can't remember what it was. Oh, there we go. The coolest thing about the lithium batteries is that they're much more efficient with solar charging. So the problem with solar is that once you get or, excuse me, the problem with regular sort of AGM type batteries is once you start to get a decent charge in them, what will happen is they will reduce the charging rate because they're starting to get full, which wastes some of your solar. So it's actually almost impossible to fully charge a battery if you're actually using solar to charge it. What the lithium does is it extends that first phase, that bulk phase, so much further, which allows you to get so much more efficiency or so much more energy out of your solar charger. And that's the same for the portable generators too, and I have two of those that we'll talk about.

Rich Whitlock: 19:32

And last thing that I like is it's so much easier on the inverter for heavy loads. So I have like a microwave and it's big, it's like a thousand watts or something like that, and when I would run it under my old AGM batteries it would pull 130 amps when it was running the microwave but under the lithiums it only pulls 80 because it's able to maintain that voltage so much higher. So the load on from the running the um, the inverters. You know especially that microwave, it was the worst. Um, that thing would just drain the battery down to like 12 volts, but when you put 80 amps on a lithium it still stays at like 12.8, 12.9. It's pretty happy with it.

Capn Tinsley: 20:09

So it's what's this portable ac that you have?

Rich Whitlock: 20:12

yeah, we'll talk about that in a second. I have that one down there that's a portable battery powered air conditioner. I bought it just to see what it would be like. Yeah, so this is an ac source selector switch. So again the thing about um, being on a nuclear submarine. And this is an AC source selector switch. So again, the thing about being on a nuclear submarine. And this is the mentality that I kind of brought over. It's about high reliability, maximum reliability, and it's about understanding everything that's going on on the submarine, where every electron's flowing, what every circuit's doing.

Rich Whitlock: 20:37

Essentially, when I bought the boat, it just had a straight shore power connector and that was its only option for AC. But I knew I wanted to install an inverter so I could have 115 volt power without running a generator or without essentially needing to be plugged into shore power. But so the question is how do I switch it from shore power to the inverter? So there's two ways of doing it. One is you can buy basically an automated kind of inverter charger combination. I know Victron makes a lot of these. Essentially what they do is they combine an inverter with a charger. So if it senses that it has power, it'll switch into charger mode, but if it loses that power it switches into inverter mode and so it provides seamless, basically integrity of your 115 volt AC. The problem with that is that I never want to rely on a black box that I don't know what it's doing Like. I want to be able to control where that source comes from. So that's why I installed that AC mode selector switch there that lets me switch between shore power off and the inverter.

Rich Whitlock: 21:39

And at the bottom left you'll see there's also a three position one as well. If you have a generator like Rarity my vote prior to this she had a generator as well. So have a generator like rarity, my boat prior to this she had a generator as well. So I had generator, shore and inverter, so that let me kind of switch between them. And the bottom right there is what you see, that's sort of my instrument panel. Um, you know, right by the navigation station. So the top left piece, that's the big piece that obviously comes with the boat, that's where you control your anchor lights and things like that. Then I've got the battery monitoring module, the little box right off to the right. The standard Horizon GX2400 is on the bottom right. The Fusion 750 radio is right kind of in the middle, and then my AC mode selector switch is like at the bottom left there, so I have everything just localized right there.

Capn Tinsley: 22:22

Okay.

Rich Whitlock: 22:26

Next up. This is probably my favorite upgrade.

Capn Tinsley: 22:28

Um is just having the inverter got a picture of the coffee maker there.

Rich Whitlock: 22:32

Oh it's absolutely key and wait till I talk about the air fryer.

Capn Tinsley: 22:34

The air fryer is like key.

Rich Whitlock: 22:37

so yeah, so the inverter, as everybody knows, it allows you to convert 12 volt dc battery power to 115 volt ac. And the thing is, I wanted to make coffee in the morning, completely quiet. I did not want to have to run a generator or anything and or boil hot water to like make coffee, I just really wanted my little K-cup machine to work and the inverter allows you to do this. Now the important thing is that with an inverter there's two different kinds. There's pure sine wave, or also called true sine wave, and then there's a modified sine wave and you can kind of see over there on the right that the way the sinusoidal waveforms look. So the top one is a pure sine wave and if you basically put an oscilloscope into your wall outlet at home, this is how it would look. You know it gently goes up and gently goes down.

Rich Whitlock: 23:20

The modified sine wave on the bottom essentially tries to approximate that same shape, but it basically does it with like diodes and the thing is it depends on what you're using. So if you're using something that essentially just turns 115 volt AC into heat like a toaster, it doesn't care what the waveform looks like. But if you have like delicate electronics, like anything that has a microprocessor in it. If you have that, um, that modified waveform it's, it's going to just play havoc with it. Um, I remember, on Rarity, when I first installed the inverter I didn't know the difference. So I got a modified sine wave and I was testing it out on the microwave and the microwave was working but it was making this terrible like buzzing sound, and I was like I don't think microwaves are supposed to make like a terrible buzzing sound.

Capn Tinsley: 24:01

No, I'm with you, hayden Coffee you better believe it, and so and so.

Rich Whitlock: 24:09

That's where I upgraded it to a slangy sort of waveform there, it's a must absolutely.

Rich Whitlock: 24:14

And um, this one, as you can see it kind of has like um two outlets and so what I do is I just kind of went to home depot and grabbed the um, made my little own little extension cord that kind of plugged in um they do make inverters that you can wire hard, wire your, your power like directly into the inverter. I don't want to do that. I want it to be able to yank out the cord if I needed to. Basically. But the coolest thing about this is there's a couple of things. The K-Cup was literally the first number one thing. Like I'd love my morning coffee. I love that thing. It's really handy for the microwave and my laptop for work and stuff like that.

Rich Whitlock: 24:46

Starlink also is very finicky. Starlink loves a pure, true sine wave. It does not. Is not very happy with the modified sine wave. But the like the air fryer, that little course Kosori or whatever, I love that thing to death, especially because I'm single and like I'm only cooking, you know, like a tilapia filet or whatever for dinner, that thing is like fantastic. I even calculated how much percent of battery if I had to cook a chicken breast right at 380 degrees for 20 minutes. How much battery. Does that draw on that little like 500 watt air fryer? And the answer is 3%. And I'm like I can live with that because with my oven it's like you know, two burner or whatever it takes like 20 minutes for that thing to heat up.

Rich Whitlock: 25:27

Um, with that air fryer it's like ready to go right out of the gate you have propane I do yeah and it takes that long to put it it just takes forever for my little oven to heat up and I don't know why it's like it. It's just. It's just inefficient. I use it if I'm cooking like four or five chicken breasts, but if it's just like one or two, hello, mr Air Fryer.

Capn Tinsley: 25:48

Okay.

Rich Whitlock: 25:49

I love that thing to death.

Capn Tinsley: 25:51

All right. So yeah, my favorite equipment on my boat is I've got, I'm all decked out too on my boat.

Rich Whitlock: 25:56

Here's my Keurig coffee maker. Yeah, I love that little one, that little, that single cup one, it was like 35 bucks. It's literally going three years now in tropical environments and has not given up yet I've got one on my boat, in the house and in my camper van oh, for sure very important the one I have at home. It's, um, it's, it's got like the, it's like got the reservoir and all that kind of stuff.

Capn Tinsley: 26:18

Yeah but this one's just, this one's just a single serve, because I was like, I'm just space efficient, but well, that was one of the tests I did is when I got you know I was trying to work out all my electronics, I went out and I anchored for like five days. And I just turned everything on running coffee, everything, just to kind of see you know where the deficiencies were.

Rich Whitlock: 26:42

Smart. Or you can do that in your slip Just unplug or turn it off and turn everything on and see how long it lasts and that's what I love about that my little battery monitor is it calculates your time to discharge, like it'll say, like you know, eight hours, 30 minutes or whatever it's really handy for that I keep mine on the percentage, but I have an app too, the victron app oh nice, yeah, that victor.

Rich Whitlock: 27:03

I use the victron app for my two solar chargers. They're really nice. So this one is an isolator for an engine start battery. So I kind of needed this one. You only really need this one if your boat spends a lot of time like on a mooring where it's sort of unattended and it's not plugged into shore power. So every boat pretty much has this, where you can see a little diagram. You've got the alternator at the top right and it goes as an input into the splitter and then the splitter basically has got one for your engine battery and one for your house battery. And what this? What the isolator does is if one battery has like a parasitic drain or a problem or you're just overusing it, it won't basically bring the other battery down along with it. Um, and so what I did? But that only works if you have basically dc power. So if your battery charger is on, which means you have to be plugged into shore power or running a generator or you're running the engine, then it'll charge it the.

Rich Whitlock: 28:03

The way most solar installations are done and the way it kind of installed, mine is the bat. The solar feeds your house bank directly, because there's no way to cross connect it with your engine start battery without putting them in parallel, and that puts them both at risk. So what I did was, with this, I bought this little, an isolator you can see it was pretty affordable and basically I just use the house battery as the actual input and then it has a single output which is to the engine start battery. So that way whenever the house battery voltage is greater than the engine start battery, it's topping up the engine start battery. But if at night and when I'm using the house battery, it falls lower, it keeps the engine start battery completely isolated. The house battery it falls lower, it keeps the engine start battery completely isolated. Like I said, this is really useful if your boat's on a mooring and you're. You only use it like once a month or something like that. You want to keep your engine start battery topped off is that 39?

Capn Tinsley: 28:54

I can barely see it. That's correct.

Rich Whitlock: 28:56

Yeah, 39, okay there's two different versions of this. I actually there's this. This is sort of the the less expensive version. There's a more expensive mosfet version and the difference is what? The mosfet version doesn't lose any voltage, um, due to the diodes, whereas this one does. But I wanted this one to lose a little bit of voltage 0.7 volts basically because I want the engine start battery never to be like overcharged. So this way it has like a little bit of safety insurance built into it and it works really well. Ever since I installed this, I've never had a problem starting the engine after it being on a mooring for a long time.

Capn Tinsley: 29:29

Okay, we do have somebody over here on Instagram. I had to copy and paste it in here. Let's see if I can pull that up.

Rich Whitlock: 29:43

Do you know this person? Do you know?

Capn Tinsley: 29:45

Marco Giannotti.

Rich Whitlock: 29:48

I don't think sometimes Instagram handles can be weird, but yes, they're definitely right about the air fryer. It's so nice the one I have for my house like has changed my life. Like it's so easy to cook. Now I just I cook chicken fish steak, you name it. It's like it's fantastic.

Capn Tinsley: 30:05

So I guess he's buying a boat. He's got a hand over going yeah, that's cool, he's got all his important items ready to go, be sure to get it.

Rich Whitlock: 30:15

Yeah, true weight, true sign inverter if you want to run it off battery. So okay anyway, that's for that one did we finish that one?

Capn Tinsley: 30:23

yeah, okay all right.

Rich Whitlock: 30:24

So these are the little portable generators. Um rarity, my boat that I had before this had an installed onan a six or seven kilowatt generator. It was really nice, but I lost her in a hurricane yeah um, I wasn't there, thankfully, but you know anyway.

Rich Whitlock: 30:38

But, um, my, but, sarilla, she doesn't have an internal generator. Um, so instead I got these things and it's funny, when I went to pick up the boat in St Lucia, I had I brought three things with me. Well, I bought my backpack, a big carry on full of like tools and some electronics and stuff. I had a sea bag from the Navy that was full of like wrenches and drills and equipment. And the third thing, or fourth thing that I brought was a brand new Honda EU 2200i generator, still in the box, and I painted the box pink because if somebody tried to steal it, they'd be stealing a pink box and at least I could make them feel silly while they were stealing it.

Capn Tinsley: 31:19

So, but then TSA went through it.

Rich Whitlock: 31:20

Yeah, and they like took off my tank. I was so disappointed. But so the 2200i on the left they have a smaller version called the 1000i. That one's on the right I have them both. Um.

Rich Whitlock: 31:31

The 2200i has bluetooth, you know it's a little bit bigger um, and it's 2200 is a bit mis misleading. That's the surge amp or that's the surge power. It can only run 1800 Watts like continuously Um, and anything in between it kind of, you know, is sort of iffy Um. But the thing about the 2200i that I like is that it can run my main air conditioning, a unit which is 16,000 BTUs. It can start it and it can run it Um. But the problem is is that it to start it you really need need. So, as you probably know, on yours there's an eco mode on it and the eco mode works great for when you're um just uh, like when the load is stabilized. But if you have a starting surge current, that really taxes it. So if you're on eco mode and you're just cruising, you know it's like at 20 percent load and you drop you two and a half kilowatts on it, it can't spin up fast enough and it'll trip offline. So in order to start the air conditioning compressor. On this, I have to turn it off at eco mode so it stays at high revs and then it can basically handle the starting surge. If I take the little one and put it in parallel with the big one, then they're both fine, so that works out really well. But the real reason I bought the little one was put it in parallel with the big one, then they're both fine, so that works out really well. But the real reason I bought the little one was because it was literally thanksgiving day, 2022. I was sailing.

Rich Whitlock: 32:54

Um, oh, we can ask. Uh, answer ducks, do you have to upgrade fire suppression system with the battery upgrade or ventilation? Um, I can't speak to have to. As opposed to like any kind of what's the, the, the, the electrical? There's electrical code for yachts. I can't remember what it is, but I can't speak to like what that is. I'm sure I have to eventually get somebody ABYC I think, abyc certified to take a look and like get my thing up to code. I don't think you have to put ventilation in.

Rich Whitlock: 33:27

The lithiums are so good at absorbing charge, they don't really get hot and there's certainly no gas or fumes or anything that comes off of it. I mean, I sleep right on top of them. As far as fire suppression, as far as I know the Coast Guard oh, that's the other thing too. I'm a licensed captain. I just got my captain's, my six pack license, just for fun to see if I could. I don't use it for anything, but I teach the boating safety kind of class at the freedom boat club up here in Dallas.

Rich Whitlock: 33:54

Um, it's Coast Guard regulations require a certain amount of fire extinguishers based on the size of the boat and the number of engines and I think the horsepower. There's like a formula for it. Um, I don't think at, maybe not yet. It's based on, like battery type. Um, that might be something that they're looking at doing, but as far as I know, I don't think that they've um they've required that. Now it might be a abyc, like the, the yachting certification, like the professional installs for electronics. Um, that might require it, but I'm honestly not sure.

Capn Tinsley: 34:19

That's a fantastic question yeah, it is a good question thank you so much for asking that.

Rich Whitlock: 34:23

Now I know what I don't know, um, but it was thanksgiving day um 2022. I was sailing my boat from mobile alabama, um to the bahamas. Two days at sea, um, I let. I think I left monday night, so it was two days at sea, and my battery? It was like 8 pm my battery got down to 50. I'm like, okay, it's time to start the 2200. So I pull it out and yank the starting cord and the starting cord just snaps right in half and I'm just like, are you kidding me?

Rich Whitlock: 34:52

So the thing, one of the things I like about the generator is not just that it lets me run the air conditioner, but it keeps hours off your main engine. And you know, it's sort of like engines on a sailboat engine hours on a sailboat. It's like mileage on a car the lower it is, the more valuable. You know, the more hours you have, the less valuable compared to another similar boat it would be. And the other thing is that it's just and I try to save my diesel fuel for actually propulsion, like if I so if the mass goes down or something like that, your diesel fuel determines your range. So I don't want to be eating up my emergency range just to recharge the batteries. Um, so I had to do the unthinkable. I actually had to start the engine to just charge the batteries, and I was crying the whole time and so, but I don't take, I don't take no for an answer. Really well. So, on some things, I know how to take no for an answer, but like I don't take I don't take no for an answer. Really well, so on some things, I know how to take no for an answer, but like I don't take defeat very well, shall we say. And so, um, I like it's Thanksgiving night, 2022.

Rich Whitlock: 35:52

I'm literally I bring the generator down into the salon or the main cabin area and I just start like taking it apart with like every tool, and after like an hour and a half, I've got the front off, the side off, and I think, heavens, for some reason, I brought.

Rich Whitlock: 36:07

Um, one of the tools that I eventually brought were like medical forceps, like these little, you know these super long like plier things, and I'm in there like just trying to grab the little starting cord thing and I finally like grab it, feed it through the hole, tie just like a little knot in it, and I started that thing up and it fired up and I was like little knot in it and I started that thing up and it fired up and I was like like thank you, heavenly father. You know, I was like I was so happy. Um, the only problem is, for the next eight months I had about a foot of cord just dangling out of the side of that thing before I could get it fixed, but it only needed like half a pull to start, cause it was so good anyway, but I was like I'm never doing this again.

Rich Whitlock: 36:43

So that's why I bought the little generator, just as a backup, you know, for that.

Capn Tinsley: 36:47

Did you fix the cord?

Rich Whitlock: 36:48

I did. I had to take it to a certified Honda like dealer just so they would like fix it like properly, because I'm not sure I even put it back together, right, but it seemed to work OK after that.

Capn Tinsley: 36:58

Well, I just wanted to let me just, let's just acknowledge that this fella is getting a Leopard 46. Yes, that this fella is getting a Leopard 46, cape Town next week. That's pretty exciting. That's luxury, right there.

Rich Whitlock: 37:08

That's a nice one. Yeah, I know some how shall we say some people who prefer luxury, who only really care about, like have no interest in being on a monohull at all, Like if they can't do a catamaran, they're not interested.

Capn Tinsley: 37:23

Yeah, well, he probably is trying to make his woman happy, don't you think there's a woman?

Rich Whitlock: 37:29

behind this. Yes, the admiral. We all know the admiral runs the ship. But um the uh, but there's um. The only the only thing I don't like about cabrans is that in theory they're easy to dismass, because on a monohull, if you take a gust, it knocks the boat over and so it spills a lot of that wind. But on a catamaran it just sits there and takes it right and so it's easy. It's easier to lose the mast on one. So, aside from that, I think catamarans have it's hard to park it that's the truth.

Capn Tinsley: 37:57

That's absolutely true I don't know where I would do that around here.

Rich Whitlock: 37:59

I'd be anchored somewhere, I guess oh, for sure, for sure, um, all right, well, anyway, so that's a generator, so I've got my little one just as a backup and when I'm underway. Yeah, I thought about getting that one.

Capn Tinsley: 38:10

but I found out this was going to be sufficient and I don't have a very big boat, so that one would be just a little too much room, you know.

Capn Tinsley: 38:20

But you know, I took it on my 2023 trip and I never even I. I basically just started it up, plugged in the air conditioner, just to plugged in the shore power, just to turn on there, just to make sure everything was good. But then after that I just never used it. Yep, I just decided I use my little DC fans while I'm at anchor and just kind of sweat it out, and if I have the fans on me, I can sleep while I'm at anchor and just kind of sweat it out, and if I have the fans on me, I can sleep.

Rich Whitlock: 38:46

That's the difference.

Capn Tinsley: 38:47

Is that if you have ventilation blowing on you, just a fan you can tolerate like 10 degrees hotter compared to if there's if it's just no ventilation and stuffy, that would be awful. There's no way to sleep in that Well for me, but if I've got a, good DC fan on me, I'm good.

Rich Whitlock: 39:04

And just open up all the hatches it literally just brings in, like it allows you to sleep in like 90 degree weather, right. So this is a solar setup that I have for siri. So I have 700 watts. Total 300 watts is in the front and that top that picture. There you can see it. I've got one big panel. It's kind of square right in front of the traveler, and I have two long panels that are on either side of the mask. Each one of those is same exact panel, just a little bit different layout and it's um so those are soft panels.

Rich Whitlock: 39:33

Yes, you can roll them up into a tube, basically tell me about those are those, those are just as good, yes, so they're actually better. So these ones were kind of expensive. I think they were like maybe 250 each or something, but they're. They're SIGs panels and I forget what that stands for, but it's made out of a certain material. It has diodes all over this thing. So the thing about the SIGs panel is they're very, very. They perform extremely well in shaded conditions.

Capn Tinsley: 39:58

Wow.

Rich Whitlock: 39:59

So that panel that you see there, the main one that's right in front of the traveler, it's like 50% shaded. Normally that would zero out any like from any kind of normal panel. That output would be zero. It's just not even going to bother. I'm sure I was getting like 40 amps out or 40 watts out of that thing. Um, so it's very sensitive, it's very um resilient, like and that's the other thing too. It's like the main sheet, the red line that you see there, that can cast a shadow. Most solar panels that would decimate its output. This one it's like it doesn't even notice.

Capn Tinsley: 40:29

So, um, it's very, it's very resilient to that so the other two in the back, those are rigid ones, right? Yes, yes, and so you just put those others out when you need them that's correct.

Rich Whitlock: 40:40

So when I'm sailing and that's obviously one side I have a mirror one on the other side and I'm kind of doing a no-no here. If you have panels in the same group, ideally they're all the same, exact size and manufacturing model, everything. I'm kind of mixing it up here because the back ones are essentially bifacial panels, so they get charged from either side of the panel, whereas the renergy one, the old-fashioned one on the front, that one is only, you know, a uniface panel, and that's just because they were originally all that uniface panel, and then I upgraded the rear ones. But the thing is, is that? So when I'm at anchor or mooring, I'll sort of angle them up like that, and you can see I'm using a. It's actually like a shower rod tensioner for the first one, just that little itty bitty white pole and that's extendable. You can see I'm using a. It's actually like a shower rod tensioner for the first one, just that little itty bitty white pole and that's extendable. So I'll angle that up. And then for the aft one, I'm just using a buoy and the buoys are the ones that I'll use. Like if I'm underway and I want to elevate the panel for some reason, I'll just tie excuse me a fender. I'll just tie a fender to it, just, you know, just because it's like it's rugged and it'll take it. Those little shower rods, I've lost several of them already because I'm lazy and I don't tie it. But most of the time when I'm sailing I just take those down and just let the panels hang vertically and that usually works. That gives you 70% of the output but without having to worry about like losing you know a fender or you know a shower rod or something like that.

Rich Whitlock: 42:10

But what's cool about the back panels with the bifacial ones? The bifacial ones that I got they're they're from Booge RV, same as the SIGs one. They I've had my back solar panel of 400 Watts pumping out 440 Watts, actual like the. You actually do get something out of the bifacial which is pretty cool and you can kind of see there that's one of my Victron. So I have two chargers. So you want different charge controllers for basically different groups of panels and that's to allow them to operate at like the most efficient voltage and things like that.

Rich Whitlock: 42:43

Originally I had all 700 watts wired in what I thought was a super smart like series parallel configuration. I know for the life of me I could not get more than 350 Watts out of the whole thing. I was like what is wrong with this? And then I broke it. I rewired it, put all front panels in parallel due to the heavy shading. The rear panels both both of the ones on the sides are in series. Then those go into parallel. But the trick is there I have one solar charger for the front and one controller for the back and that allows them to operate at very different voltages. And you can see there, just in that thing off to the right with the display, this is the rear one. Out of 400 watts I was getting 393, which is it's.

Rich Whitlock: 43:23

It's very hard with solar panels to actually hit your theoretical maximum. Like it's very difficult. But you can see here the total network power was close to 600. So the front solar panels for 300 Watts, we're putting out 200. And the battery was just charging like crazy, like this. That's my favorite thing to do is like see the battery charging at like 35 amps forever, because it's not like you're running your generator, you know, it's like literally just charging like a bat out of heck for free.

Capn Tinsley: 43:52

Okay, yeah, I have two different controllers Victron, one for each panel, 375 each, and we put in one for each panel.

Rich Whitlock: 44:03

That's very smart. That's the most efficient way to do it. Everybody says put them in parallel. The problem with parallel is that you start putting if you have enough wattage, you start putting so much current through the wires that you lose a lot of current oh yeah and due to what's called the I square r losses.

Capn Tinsley: 44:18

So parallel means um. You're putting them all on one controller parallel basically means like um the.

Rich Whitlock: 44:26

so if you have like two panels and let's say they both put out 20 volts, if you put them in parallel, that means like you have one panel here, one panel here, and you tie the top, top, the positive outputs together and you tie the bottom outputs together, so you can lose one panel and the other panel will still just do its job. That's, that's what's called in parallel. The other way to do it is in series, where you daisy chain for lack of a better term the output of one panel to the input of another. So in this one you'd have 20 volts pumping out, let's say, 10 amps. In this case you'd have 40 volts pumping out five amps. So it's still the same amount of power. It's just that the way, the voltage and the current essentially is different.

Rich Whitlock: 45:09

The problem is. So doing it in series is better if you don't have any like shading or anything else, because you have a lower current. And if you have a lower current you have lower, basically power losses through the wire. They're called I squared R losses. You take the current, you square it, multiply it by the resistance. That's the power that you lose in basically just from the wiring. So if you have everything in parallel, which is which is ideal from a shading perspective, you're going to be losing power just due to pumping so much current through that. So people try to basically figure out what's the blessed bend of series. Up until the point there I have risk shading and then I switch over to parallel. So due to heavy shading, all of my front panels are set up in a parallel configuration and in the back, because I've got panels on either side, I have each panel in series and those are connected in parallel.

Capn Tinsley: 46:01

So yeah, I've got a friend who I'm trying to talk him into getting. I thought maybe some of the this, this, the soft ones, what do you call them? Flexible, flexible ones might be good for his boat. And I wasn't. We weren't sure. We were trying to figure it out if they were, if they were just as good, but it sounds like there's a lot of benefit to them well, the flexible ones, for sure that.

Rich Whitlock: 46:22

But these ones you could literally roll up and they came in a tube Right and so they were extremely flexible. But what I didn't care about the flexibility or not, what I cared about was that they were SIGs, so they were. They're highly resilient to shading.

Capn Tinsley: 46:34

Right.

Rich Whitlock: 46:34

They're the best panels that you can buy for any kind of shading. That's nice. Now, one thing I wanted to make a mention of is a lot of folks basically will install an arch on the back of their boat and, you know, put the panels on that. And that's great too, because you can use that for a dinghy lift and you put your panels on that. I just don't. I'm a minimalist in some ways, so I kind of like just keeping things to a I like the clean look.

Rich Whitlock: 46:57

The other thing that a lot of folks do is they'll take their panels and they'll put it on top of the bimini. And that's pretty and that's a good idea too, as long as you never have to lower or collapse your bimini and for my boat I love the elements and so I just keep my bimini permanently. I'd have to hunt for it. I have no idea where it is. I think I might. But the point is that if you put your panels on top of your bimini, if you ever want to collapse your bimini to just, one of my favorite things to do is sail at night, away from land, when it's like pitch black out, without a cloud in the sky. It's darker than a planetarium, because the planetarium has, like the exit line row lighting and stuff like that. But if you're in the middle of the ocean and there's no clouds, it is so dark you can't even tell where the sky starts and where the horizon sort of ends.

Capn Tinsley: 47:44

Here, my, here's my setup. Oh yeah, that's beautiful, so I don't have this. Bimini is not up. You can see it's. It's folded over itself in the back because I rarely use it. I do have the dodger over the over the uh companionway I see that, yeah, but there's a big gap in the middle, and I like it that way oh I like to be able to see the sails.

Rich Whitlock: 48:08

I like to see what's going on, yeah because I hate like having to sort of look out. Yeah, it's like running blind I just love looking at the sky and seeing the stars at night, you know and you say I've got a?

Capn Tinsley: 48:19

um, I've got a starlink there and the garmin radar and the uh, all my goodies there I love that, that's so cool.

Rich Whitlock: 48:26

Oh, and all my goodies there. I love that, that's so cool. Oh, and you have a wind generator. Yes that's it. That's another thing too, like the, so the perfect boat would have as many we learned. So this is something sort of mentality we carried through on the submarine. You want basically redundant but not identical methods of generating power.

Capn Tinsley: 48:45

It's not near as much yeah but at least it's something yeah you know, there's something we had a battery reactor and a diesel generator. So if you're, uh, if you're, I'm gonna put this up. There's a comment from over here on um. This is over on uh, yeah, if you're at anchor, and it's real windy at night, that's something you know for sure okay.

Rich Whitlock: 49:07

So, and it's smart because it's diverse. So if the sun's out, you can use your solar, but if there's, if it's cloudy, you you know, and you have wind, you can use your wind.

Capn Tinsley: 49:15

So that's pretty smart too okay, yes, there is, but oh, I think we were talking about the woman yeah, if you follow her wishes. But if you would, if would follow her wishes would be about. I'm not sure what he's saying, because he has a big fridge, so I told her I'd be a leopard for me in a nice biking fridge see, that's compromise, that's a good relationship right there. I knew it had something to do with a woman yeah, but at least she's on the boat.

Rich Whitlock: 49:43

She's in, she's, she's, she's leaving the dock. She's leaving the dock. Here's in, she's, she's, she's leaving the dock, she's leaving the dock.

Capn Tinsley: 49:47

Here's another one besides. Guys, thank you, because I learned a lot in here. Thank you so much thank you for commenting.

Rich Whitlock: 49:54

Anybody else want to?

Capn Tinsley: 49:55

comment and and uh, hayden, I know you want to jump in here because he's a real boat geek you know, upgrade guy so I can't wait. He's over there listening. He's going to chime in again, I know he is excellent.

Rich Whitlock: 50:07

Yeah, and, like I said, I want to do a special shout out to the island spirit guys, just because they're. You know that. They're the reason why I'm in saint martin here and I'm getting ready to move the boat down to grenada to get it out of her.

Capn Tinsley: 50:16

Uh, the zone for hurricane season okay, but yeah, they just ended their season.

Rich Whitlock: 50:20

I guess you saw that yeah, and they're uh, uh, yeah, antigua, yeah, that's right yeah, they're, but well, the boat is where did you leave it?

Capn Tinsley: 50:31

again, it was, it was not.

Rich Whitlock: 50:32

They didn't leave in antigua this time no, I thought they did, but maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm wrong.

Capn Tinsley: 50:38

I think they left it there last year, but anyway, it's somewhere down there. But they're back in, uh, philly, I guess, or philadelphia.

Rich Whitlock: 50:44

Yeah, and that's cool because pennsylvania that island's got a lot of mountains so it's really well shaded from winds and stuff.

Capn Tinsley: 50:50

Oh, and if you've seen their videos of what they do to it when they leave it.

Rich Whitlock: 50:54

Oh, it's insane. I've never seen anybody.

Capn Tinsley: 50:56

I forget what they call it down rigging. It's a whole operation and he's got it all on. You know it's all organized, so if you wanted to have it, you he would send it to you. Yeah well, I told him I wanted to do a video on that and he said it might be too boring, but I think people would people want to know.

Rich Whitlock: 51:13

Oh, that's a big that's a big deal like re-rigging, de-rigging and re-rigging.

Capn Tinsley: 51:17

So yeah, I just hired somebody for that no, I hired somebody.

Rich Whitlock: 51:20

I was like I'm not going to touch that because. And then on the submarine in the military we call that safety of ship and the thing about safety of ship is like items like sub safe, um, you don't mess around with them. So I wanted to make sure even though in theory I could watch a youtube, read books and in theory kind of figure it out, I just didn't want to mess with it something like that.

Capn Tinsley: 51:38

So you just took down your standing.

Rich Whitlock: 51:40

I mean, you're running rigging um, I pretty much outsourced the whole thing, but but you didn't take, you didn't mess with the, with the, the mass or anything like that right. No, I took the sails off to make it easy. But they, you know, they essentially, you know, took the did, the shrouds and the stays and the, the, the roller furler and all that kind of stuff. They just brought it down. I mean, it was expensive too. It cost me like seven 8,000 bucks to rig it.

Capn Tinsley: 52:03

Um so, oh, okay de-rigging and re-rigging uh, this is great stuff and antigua there we go antigua okay yeah, you're right.

Rich Whitlock: 52:15

What else did we have? Oh, we've got just got a few minutes we can. Let's see here. So that's a solar piece. I'll kind of go through these other ones pretty quick a starlink. So the thing I want to say about starlink I'm sure everybody has it um, it is the gateway to being able to, you know, work remotely if you can. Um, the thing is like.

Capn Tinsley: 52:31

Originally I bought the regular dishy so we just have to stop and acknowledge this one.

Rich Whitlock: 52:35

He says the best boating podcast ever.

Capn Tinsley: 52:37

We have to acknowledge that comment.

Rich Whitlock: 52:40

That's extremely kind sailing from.

Capn Tinsley: 52:41

Boston to South Carolina next week. Thank you for your inspiration.

Rich Whitlock: 52:45

That's outstanding. That's outstanding, you're going to, that's going to be a beautiful voice. So the thing about Starlink everybody has it. But I was like, wow, that thing takes up a lot of power. Like the regular dish you can draw like 50 Watts or so and it's like four amps, and four amps, you know, multiplied over hours and hours and hours can put a drain on your battery. So I did some research and I found the Starlink Mini. That one only draws like 15 watts, which is one amp, which is almost nothing, and so I bought that and I love it to death. Essentially, with Starlink, just, I'm sure most people can do the research, but if you're less than 12 miles from land you can use a Roam plan and there's different ones, but like Roam 50 is 50 gigabytes a month. For 50 a month, it's pretty good. If you go more than 12 miles from land, then you have to switch to the rome unlimited, which is 165 a month, but then you have to activate the priority data for two dollars per gigabyte. But if it lets you like, do work and, and you know, keep in touch with friends and stuff, it's well worth it.

Rich Whitlock: 53:43

One thing that I have is I bought this ecoFlow Delta 2 power pack. It's that little thing on the bottom right. I bought this for the original Dishy because it was consuming so much power. I wanted it to have its own dedicated power source so I wouldn't drain down. The one thing that I like do not like is draining my main battery down low at night. That's just. I just don't want to be in that position. So essentially I bought a little power pack just for it's like a thousand watt hours, so it can do okay. I bought a little power pack so I could control and sort of segregate the original Dishy at 50 watts, keep it just separate, but at 15 I still use it for the mini. But at 15 watts that thing will last forever.

Capn Tinsley: 54:21

So it's just nice to kind of have on its own little separate circuit now, okay, so this may have changed, but um, I thought it was 40 miles offshore no, it's, it's 12.

Rich Whitlock: 54:32

Um, if they and there's a couple different things about it too I have the mobile one like you yeah, it's 165.

Capn Tinsley: 54:38

And then the other one which, of course, this was probably changed was like 200 if you're going to go further than 40 miles yeah it's, it's 400, it's.

Rich Whitlock: 54:46

So there's different. Yeah, there's like 250 plan and there's other things, but it literally will stop your service mid -sentence if you go more than 12 miles away, if it's considered offshore. Now, the cool thing about, I think, most of the Bahamas it doesn't like plot out the individual islands just like, okay, this is the Bahamas, but I knew that whenever I'm more than 12 miles offshore I have to activate my um. I upgrade to rome unlimited and then activate the priority data and it'll work.

Rich Whitlock: 55:13

Um, the thing about starlink to be aware of is that they have, essentially, starlink looks at the countries in, or the world in two through two lenses. One is does starlink have an agreement with this country? If so, then essentially you can stay in that country as long as you want. They don't care where your address is. However, if Starlink does not have an agreement with that country, then it only lets you stay in that country and use Starlink for up to 60 days and then it will hard cut you off. And that's because, essentially, under 60 days you fall into the transitory category and under 60 days you fall into the transitory category and over 60 days you fall out of the transitory category and you have to upgrade to like the $400 a month plan or whatever. So what you want to?

Rich Whitlock: 55:54

The cool thing about the mini is I can just stuff it in my backpack, take it back to the U? S, and it has its own router built into it too. I can just stuff it in my backpack, take it back to the U? S, turn it on, reset its location and go anywhere in the world for another 60 days. Otherwise I'd have to be lugging that huge dishy and the router and all that other kind of stuff.

Capn Tinsley: 56:15

Okay.

Rich Whitlock: 56:15

All right, just watch out for that 60 day thing if you're not in a Starlink friendly category. So the grill I'll go through this one quick. A lot of people have like a magma grill which is sort of marine marine designed. But I did a lot of research on this and a lot of people swear by this grill in a marine environment. The weber q 1200, the they call it the baby q. Um, essentially one thing I wanted a grill. I wanted to heat up quick but also be resilient to like if there's a gust of wind it's still, it doesn't blow out the the flame. And apparently this baby q is like one of the best for that. So I I bought on amazon a piece of starboard, which is that white base, and then I mounted it down. Um, then I basically bolted it onto the base with these little connectors very cool and then.

Rich Whitlock: 56:58

So I use my little that thing there. It's cool because I have the temperature gauge and stuff too, but this is like reasonably priced, it's like 200. There's an old joke. You can actually find it online. It basically shows a screwdriver and it says screwdriver two dollars. And then it goes boat screwdriver four dollars. And it's the same exact thing. Just adding marine on something triples its price. And I think magma has gotten away with that for a long time yeah, they're pretty expensive for sure, for sure.

Rich Whitlock: 57:22

But this one does the same job. And you can see I bought those little um, those little uh, grill rail clamps on the top Right. That's what I use to mount to the bottom of the starboard. And then, the important thing, in the bottom left picture, I've got a little back brace. That back brace is key because it keeps it flat, because if otherwise, if you open up the lid, it puts a lot of weight on the back of it and without that back brace it'll just like literally just fall over. It's a lot of weight on the back of it and without that back brace it'll just like literally just fall over.

Rich Whitlock: 57:47

Um, and I also looked at okay, well, what's the proper way to hook up your propane tank to your marine grill? And magma wants like 200 for this, like regulator, all this crap. And I was like there's got to be a better way to do this. And then I found on amazon that little adapter tube right there. Literally it's like 20 bucks. You just screw one end. My boat has two propane tanks. One of them's permanent, like I just keep it connected to the, the main internal grill and stove. The other one I just hooked the little green thing up to the tank and then hook the other end of it right up to the grill and it'll last forever. It'll last me like a year yeah it's real.

Capn Tinsley: 58:23

It's real, I have a connector like that, but I'm not, haven't used it. That's. That's awesome that you're that you're making use of that.

Rich Whitlock: 58:30

Oh, it's nice because I have a dedicated tank for the internal stove and one that I dedicate for the guys, I have to also, and I'll be a long time to.

Capn Tinsley: 58:39

Before I get to the second one, and especially now with the air fryer.

Rich Whitlock: 58:42

Oh my god, I use so much less gas that air fryer oh yeah I tell you, leslie did me a solid on that one.

Rich Whitlock: 58:48

So portable air conditioner. So this one is like coming. I just bought it just to see what it was like. So that's a picture of it set up there on my salon table and the tubes are once for the intake and once for the exhaust. Um, with an air conditioner, you want to make sure that, um, you have a dedicated intake and a dedicated exhaust, because otherwise you're just basically recirculate. It's using the same air to essentially that it blows to heat and cool, and it's not a good idea you see this, hayden, you got a portable air conditioner so it's not just that.

Rich Whitlock: 59:19

The cool thing about it is that it's battery powered because, like, I've got a main air conditioner that's built into the boat. But I don't really only use that if um to entertain like a yeah for shore power, or like that poor little honda eu 2200i if I want to emergency.

Capn Tinsley: 59:34

I'll heat emergency so this one's battery powered.

Rich Whitlock: 59:38

The wave two is what I have. It's the 50 um 100 btu. The latest one that they have, the wave three, you know, came out a few months ago. It's like 6500 btu, so of course they're going to improve it right after I buy it. Yeah, and um, but it's nice. It'll run three and a half hours Um, and it's only like 5,000 BTU, so it's not going to make your boat freezing, but it's fantastic for either spot cooling or reducing humidity and how much does that cost?

Rich Whitlock: 1:00:03

Oh, oh, it was like a thousand dollars I think, but I mean, I was like whatever, let me just try it oh, don't let radine, see this stop so the coolest thing about it there's two things.

Rich Whitlock: 1:00:14

One is so you see, like the front of it right there and there's a little vent out, outlet, vent on the top, literally.

Rich Whitlock: 1:00:21

It's one thing that if you're trying to cool down your whole boat, but if I'm like doing work or something or I'm just reading, I'll just sit there, I'll point that the outlet right at my face from two feet away and it is. You don't care how cool the rest of the boat is. If you're just like have 65, you know 60 degree coolness blowing on you, it's so great and the coolest. And I also have a little adapter that I can put on the front of it that essentially takes the air outlet, the discharge of the cool air, and I just it's a tube, I just run it straight from the discharge right into the front cabin where I sleep at anchor and it literally will cool down the front cabin like really, really quickly. But the coolest thing is that it just reduces humidity. The other cool thing is that it doesn't rely on the main ship's battery or ship you can tell them Navy boats battery and it doesn't require me running the Honda generator for it. So I can just run it three and a half hours.

Capn Tinsley: 1:01:17

You're a power guy.

Rich Whitlock: 1:01:19

By the time it dies. It's all about power management. So I looked at a boat. There's four things you need to manage, almost in order buoyancy. So I look at a boat. There's four things you need to manage, almost in order buoyancy, water or buoyancy, propulsion, water and food. If you have those things, and power is the fifth one. So if you can manage, if you can manage those five things buoyancy, propulsion, power, water and fuel you are like good to go.

Capn Tinsley: 1:01:41

So buoyancy is very important.

Rich Whitlock: 1:01:43

Buoyancy is like that's the number one, but. But so I try to keep it segregated so I can just run that thing till it dies and I'm already asleep and I'm good to go. So dinghies, so I think that's the one up next. So of course I have three dinghies because one's not enough.

Rich Whitlock: 1:01:57

The first one I bought was this this West Marine PHP performance high pressure three, 10,. It's a 10, 10 foot but it has this inflatable high pressure keel and the idea behind it is they were trying to figure out how do we make a best of both worlds that has the performance of a rib with the basically storage ability of of a complete, of a complete inflatable. And this was the closest thing that I found. I was actually able to get it up. It gets up just fine on my three and a half outboard horsepower outboard of struggles. I used to have a two and a half I could get it up on. It flies with my six, but I can just store it deflated in between the helm station. So it's just great, I can store it without having to it doesn't? I don't have to put it up on the deck, it literally will store anywhere.

Rich Whitlock: 1:02:39

So the second one is this little eight foot dinghy, this roll up so you can see it over there. It's like that are you 250 or whatever? It barely holds me. Um, you know it's eight feet. Um, I had some yachties call it the cutest outboard or dinghy they've ever seen. Um, but I mostly got it for the kids, because and kids I define on a boat as anybody either under the age of 35 or doesn't know the difference between like a line and a rope, right, or like a sheet and a stay.

Rich Whitlock: 1:03:07

If you don't, then you then you're a kid. And the thing is, when you have a kid on a boat, you basically tell them two things don't touch anything and don't do anything. And they get. Basically there's nothing for them to do. So I got this dinghy. It was it was.

Rich Whitlock: 1:03:21

I was actually buying the electric outboard I'll talk about that in a second but they were like, hey, for 200 bucks, do you want this brand new dinghy? We've never used it. I was like, yeah, that'd be great for the kids. So if you have kids on board my kids are 14, girl and 11, boy you just inflate this, put the electric outboard on it and just tell them to go have fun, and that lets them do their own thing. And then the last one I just bought this a couple months ago as an eight foot rib. I finally like got a real rib. That's the bottom left. It's actually a high field, but that's a West Marine one. It's pretty tiny, but just because of it's a rib or whatever, like I love having that hard bottom. Like you step into it and you don't feel like the squish. You know it's like such a it's and I can get it up on plane easy with that six horsepower outboard that I have.

Capn Tinsley: 1:04:07

We have a question from Instagram and. I think that Hayden can answer this. He just had some made somewhere down there when to buy chap covers to the dinghy. I have a Taka Cat. I would love to find for a Taka Cat.

Rich Whitlock: 1:04:24

So my little dinghy, the one one for the kids, the kids named it lord farquad um. I don't know if you ever saw the shrek. You know that little short john lithgow, like guy the prince, the evil prince or whatever, like he was so tiny, like they called. They called the dinghy lord farquad um. But that one in my main dinghy, which I call kelpie, which is um cerilla's horse, um, both those are fully deflatable, so I just kind of shove them like and cover them up. I have a cover that's designed or just that I got off Amazon for like 50 bucks that covers up the inflatable dinghy. I don't have a chap cover for the for the rib yet, so that's something that I probably need to get.

Capn Tinsley: 1:05:02

Yeah, right now it's just stored on the four deck upside down, but that's a great question and I'm gonna have to research if anybody out there knows where I can get um dingy dingy chaps for a tacocat. You know, the little catamaran. Oh, those are so cool yeah and I got that because I could um, okay, hayden says some, I got it, so I it folds up and goes into two bags inside the boat and when I get across the gulf then I can put my you know, put the whole dinghy thing together, but I prefer not to be swinging, you know, as I'm going across the gulf.

Rich Whitlock: 1:05:38

I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, okay.

Capn Tinsley: 1:05:40

So he says most canvas makers will do chats for about a thousand bucks.

Rich Whitlock: 1:05:45

That's expensive. Woo-hooo, I checked Craigslist marketplace first. Or sorry, nobody uses that anymore.

Capn Tinsley: 1:05:51

Facebook marketplace yeah yeah you, you are good at finding deals, mm-hmm and that's a lot right there yeah, for sure but if you want to protect your million dollar dinghy and the next step I have the outboards.

Rich Whitlock: 1:06:09

Um, so I have three outboards because of course I do um are all these on the boat?

Rich Whitlock: 1:06:14

yes, for sure, oh my gosh, and it's, it's stuffed, but I make it work. And um, you got a bigger boat. Like I said, I had to sacrifice half the aftport stateroom to get it to work. But there's a reason for each outboard. So the three and a half horsepower Mercury, that one's really light, that's only 40 pounds and it's easy to mount in tough conditions. So if you've got one or two foot waves or swells or whatever, if you've ever tried to mount a heavy outboard onto a dinghy when the dinghies and the boat is like going like this, it's not the time to do it.

Capn Tinsley: 1:06:47

It's no fun at all.

Rich Whitlock: 1:06:48

No so it's. So the the little outboard weighs a third less than the big one, so there's less risk of it. Basically, you know, joining davy jones locker um. So that's pretty much the the main reason why I have that one um. Plus, I needed a backup um because's propulsion. So then I've got the Tohatsu. This is like a 2005, a little bit older, so it's a five horsepower. Oh, very cool. Do you want to talk about his question? Let's see here.

Capn Tinsley: 1:07:15

Yeah, I'm sorry about so many questions, but I live in Brazil and I have restricted options. But thank you, profile. Thank you, canvas shops Okay.

Rich Whitlock: 1:07:26

He's talking about the canvas shots, yeah, yeah. So the thing about the, the five horsepower outboard is and this is true for any outboard where they offer a four, five and a six horsepower model look at the weights. The weight of the outboard between the four, five and six guarantee you it's the same exact weight, which makes you wonder well, why is it different? The answer is a carburetor. It's the. It's the cheapest trick in the book, like all they do for to up the horsepower is they put in a bigger carburetor. Um, so I took my five horsepower outboard, bought the six horsepower carburetor for like a hundred bucks and now I've got a six horsepower outboard.

Rich Whitlock: 1:08:01

Um, you know, if you go from a four to a six, you might need to change the propeller pitch or something, because you know whatever. But um, point is, is that the four, five and six, mechanically they're the same. If you look at the parts catalog, a lot of these things the only thing that's different is the carburetor. So just buy the bigger carb, put it on, see if it works. But so this horse, this five, six horsepower, to hot suit to install it if it's relatively calm, but it can get that rib up on a plane like nobody's joke. I mean it flies and it has an external tank and so you fill it up and it literally goes like for 50 miles or whatever. It's really nice because that little Mercury, it has the internal tank. So I always have to carry a spare gas can and a funnel with me to fill it up.

Capn Tinsley: 1:08:41

I have one of those Mine's two and a half. Oh yeah, I had a two and a half Yamaha.

Rich Whitlock: 1:08:45

Yamaha, I think, makes some of the best outboards, like some of the most reliable. And then the third one that I have is this Torquedo, this electric one I was just wanting. I bought it like for novelty. But there's two things that I like about it. One it is ridiculously easy to mount. You could mount this thing like in a hurricane, because it comes in pieces. The whole thing's like 30 pounds, um the the base of it, the base of it without the battery is like 20 pounds, so because it detaches, then you install the control handle, which weighs like one pound, and then you install the battery, which weighs like 10 pounds. So it's 30 pounds total, but in pieces. It's so easy to get on, um, but the thing that I like most about it is that it's guaranteed to start.

Rich Whitlock: 1:09:27

My greatest fear is taking my dinghy to like some snorkel spot out, like in the ocean, like away from land, where you're not in a bay or something, and you know you anchor, you go snorkel, you come back on the dinghy and the outboard doesn't want to start. That's like one of my greatest fears. And so this little electric thing starts every time without question. So if I ever need to worry about the reliability of making sure I can get back. I'll always generally take. I'll make sure it's within range and then I'll make sure I take that thing, okay, um.

Rich Whitlock: 1:09:59

The other thing is, since it's electric, in theory you can charge it with solar and um, but you'd have to carry the panels around and it would charge really slowly. It's like a thousand watt hour battery. So if you had a hundred watt solar panel you'd have to charge it under perfect conditions for 10 hours to like fully recharge it. So it works. It works great in theory. I've done it once to see what it if just to say I did and I'm not sure it did anything at the bottom right um, is like the little table that they give you, basically with the range. They say essentially it lasts 45 minutes at full power and your range is like five miles. Um, if you go at half power it'll last like six hours and your range is like 18 miles or something like that. I've never tried to test it, but um, in theory it's nice to have but, like I said, the biggest thing for me is that it's guaranteed to start.

Capn Tinsley: 1:10:47

I can't believe you carry three.

Rich Whitlock: 1:10:49

Oh for sure, and I just stuff them anywhere I can. But they're actually pretty. The coolest thing is I managed to figure out how to stuff them without putting one of them on my little outboard holder in the cockpit, because I don't like seeing the outboard there. So I shove one of them in the port cockpit locker, one of them starboard cockpit locker. Those are the two gas ones and the third one I shove um in that port, um aft port statering basically.

Capn Tinsley: 1:11:11

so none of them are like you can really see everything's on the port side, so you have something else on this on the starboard side, to to balance the weight to balance it.

Rich Whitlock: 1:11:20

Yeah, no, that's where the spare anchor. So I told you the 65 pound mantis I bought, I still kept the boat's original 44 pound cqr the power load is heavy. Yeah, and then, and then I've got the um sadly, since it's just me and I don't carry many provisions like it's still like there's a lot of water lines still exposed, um, but then I've got like a 30 pound danforth or whatever that's stuffed somewhere wow but so for this chart plotter, so this is super important.

Rich Whitlock: 1:11:45

So for the chart plotter, so this is super important. So for the chart plotter. It came. The book came with a Raymarine Axiom 9. But the thing about the regular Axioms is that they're very touchscreen, they're touchscreen only, and maybe Raymarine is just really bad about this. I don't know if like B&G, I think, or Garmin or whatever like, are better. If there's like any condensation on the touchscreen at all, it just will go crazy when you try to touch it, which isn't great.

Capn Tinsley: 1:12:08

So that's not good it's really designed.

Rich Whitlock: 1:12:10

These things are really designed for like power boats, where you've got inside the cockpit the pilot house and stuff.

Rich Whitlock: 1:12:16

I don't know why they put them on sailboats, but anyway. Point is is that, for the longest time, if I ever wanted to touch the screen, I would have to go down and get a paper towel and wipe the screen dry and then try to touch it, and the worst part, though, was switching it basically. So, at night, you turn it on to from, basically, day mode into night mode, where it's um, it turns everything like red and black, um, and then I turned the screen intensity down. The problem is, if you forget to raise the screen, the intensity of the screen, and switch it back to day mode. Now it's so, now it's light out and the screen is black because it's in black mode and it's so dim you can't see it. So I would have to do and literally it's just all picturesque I would have to grab a towel, a dark towel like that dark purple one you see above the starling. I would have to grab that, put my head next to the screen, put the towel over my head and the screen to basically create like a mini dark room so I could see the screen, and then actually use that to raise the intensity.

Rich Whitlock: 1:13:20

Anyway, so my company was having a good year. It's nice to own your own company. You get to reward yourself. So my company was having my good year, so I decided to reward myself and I was like you know what? I'm going to get a bigger one, I'm going to get the 12 instead of the nine, but I'm going to get the pro. And the thing about the pro is that it has the buttons like right on it, so right off to the thing, that you can like move it up and down. But the important thing is it has a power button there and if you just keep pressing the power button, it'll change the brightness, the brightness up.

Rich Whitlock: 1:13:54

Yeah, that's like a garmin yeah, and then you can just hit the switch it over to day mode and I'm like I love this thing so much. I mean it's two thousand dollars. I can't say like, yeah, like I said, I was blessed because my company was having a good year. I don't know if I was more. If I was. Whatever, the point is is that it was a nice luxury for me. But the point is is that if you have a Raymarine thing, either prepare, have a towel standing by for when you need to switch it into day mode, and they do buy the little keypad. You can essentially buy it separately. It's like 400 bucks and it does the same thing, so you don't have to buy a brand new chart plotter. I wanted a bigger one.

Capn Tinsley: 1:14:31

Um, but that's pretty cool. Garmin, I'm a.

Rich Whitlock: 1:14:33

I'm a garmin gal and uh, I know that hayden has bng yeah, I'm pretty sure raymarine has been really buggy, um, and so I mean it's okay, I, I had it, I everything was already outfitted with raymarine, so it would have been okay. I had it like everything was already outfitted with Raymarine, so it would have been like really intensive to switch everything to something else. I believe, like B&G and maybe Garmin, like I would recommend them.

Capn Tinsley: 1:14:54

I've had a lot of problems with the Raymarine stuff so this one from Instagram said hey, can you check my message when you get the chance? Is that, who is that directed to land on salsa official? Yeah, do you know that? Do you know? Okay, so tell us what you're talking about and we'll try to get that answer. And here's another on your long sail, that far from land. Did you make any changes or special preparations, reconfiguring things like for so great question?

Rich Whitlock: 1:15:24

like that is such a fantastic question, right and so. So the thing is, um, you check the forecast often, and one thing that a lot of people do is they will reduce sail at night. They'll essentially put in the first reef on either the main or the jib at night, just in case, like there's a gust or something. Yeah, because if you don't want to be at night fighting a sail, it's just no fun.

Capn Tinsley: 1:15:49

Yeah, too late.

Rich Whitlock: 1:15:50

So that is one thing. Any changes to special preparations I did buy I don't really talk about it in the equipment, but I do have a drogue on the boat. I have two different ones. And then I bought a sea anchor right before I left, just like an 18-foot parachute anchor. I think it was by Paratech or something. Um, just in case a hurricane showed up on top of me. Um, I've I keep it in the Ford cabin. I've never used it. Um, mostly I just plotted out you know what food I needed. Um, the one thing that I did do is I enlisted the help of, uh, chris Parker for marine weather service, um, and basically was emailing with him and was like, hey, what do you think about this, what do you think about that? So, between that and using Predict Wind, I was able to. I had pretty good confidence in essentially that trip, which is why I sort of left.

Capn Tinsley: 1:16:37

Yeah, the weather and making sure your boat, everything's working and are the most important things, and I can't do the work myself, like you, so I have the rigger come out and I can't do the work myself, like you, so I have the rigger come out and I have him make his inspection, and then I have other guys come out and check every, every hose, every, every clamp, everything and weather, yeah, and I have a weather expert that I consult with and I've gotten pretty good at it too, but I always get a consensus, you know, mm-hmm. Concur, okay, so Hayden says B&G has touch buttons?

Rich Whitlock: 1:17:13

yes, just like mine does. Thank God for that because, like you don't want to be, if that screen gets wet, you do not want it to be useless yeah, that's a little yeah, like I said I would have to. I went through so many paper towels when I first bought that boat, just wiping that thing off just in the middle of the ocean.

Capn Tinsley: 1:17:27

Oh but-. So why didn't you get a?

Rich Whitlock: 1:17:29

Garmin. Oh cause, I would have had to change out the wind speed sensor, the radar, it's like I just didn't want to have to mess with it.

Rich Whitlock: 1:17:37

So I was. You're sort of like, at some point you're locked into it, but I will. So the. So the thing that gave me confidence about sailing that far and I've sailed my boat five, 6,000 miles by myself I think so, and don't ask me if I, like you know, keep a proper watch at night. I'm not going to answer that but the thing about someone once said your boat floats the same in the middle of the ocean as it does in a bathtub. The physics are the same. It's not like, oh, I'm 600 miles from land, so now the boat's going to sink. Like something bad has to happen to you for the boat to sink, and usually what happens bad is not. Is the waves right? A boat can handle plenty of wind. Where it's not great, it's handling waves.

Rich Whitlock: 1:18:17

So it's very important to you know, understand the weather. And in fact, captain Tinsley, as you know, like from your Coast Guard license, you know a third or like a quarter of your Coast Guard license test when you go to test the four modules. It's about weather. And the reason is is because, like, if you're in a power boat or something and there's like bad weather coming up and you're smart like there's. So, if you're on a boat, there's things like collision, like running into something, trying to dock it, going down a narrow channel, understanding the rules of the road. These are all things that you have some control over, right, the thing about weather is that you have no control over it and it happens to you. You're not a willing participant in it. You can be like it's like that old expression, you might not be interested in police, but police are interested in you. It's one of those things where bad weather happens to you and there's nothing you can do about it.

Rich Whitlock: 1:19:11

So, um, it's important. The most important thing hands down, is just like making sure the weather, and to me, the second most important thing was the autopilot. Um, because making sure that was like in good condition, because the autopilot, especially if you're single handing, serves as your second crew member. And I did have a problem with my autopilot where the actual autopilot, the display box for it, kept saying no pilot. I was like, oh no, this do not break. Like right before I go on this thing, cause you can you imagine for eight days by yourself having to steer a boat Like the most mental?

Capn Tinsley: 1:19:42

No, I do know somebody that happened to going across the Pacific. I saw that on one of your podcasts waves, oh, my god insane what a misery. Mentally it's exhausting yeah, like most people, there's no sleeping in that yep most people can steer a boat like on a single course.

Rich Whitlock: 1:19:58

It's one thing if you're going through a busy harbor, because then you're like busy, right, but if you're just going from a to b for a thousand miles, people will go mentally crazy after like an hour of just steering the same course. So your autopilot, that's the only thing that lets you like breathe, sleep, eat, go to the, you know, go to the bathroom, whatever. So it started saying no pilot and I was like, oh my God. But then I realized it was still working, even though it said no pilot. And what I realized? It was just a bad connection on the box, like the autopilot computer and the RAM and all the electronics were fine. It was just a bad plugin to the box.

Capn Tinsley: 1:20:29

So, um, that's what did you do?

Rich Whitlock: 1:20:32

Oh, I just basically just kind of shimmied the plug and pushed it up so that it would have a stronger connection and it was fine. It's it's been. It's been fine since then. Um, but even then I could still use. So the cool thing about the autopilot I'm sure B and G is the same I can control the autopilot not just from the little autopilot control box, the little multifunction display that they have, but I can also control it from the chart plotter screen as well, like tell it to go left 10, right 10, steer this course.

Rich Whitlock: 1:21:06

So it doesn't matter if there's a bad connection to that little control box, if I can control it right from the being, right from the thing itself. So and then I think the last slide I had was just about bottom sonar imager. I always thought that I was like you know, I wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau, you know, or like Indiana Jones or, even better, bob Bollard. He was the guy who found the Titanic, or led the team that found the Titanic, like you kind kind of see here. So this is just this little Real Vision 3D transducer. I screwed it in, mounted it right behind the rudder, and it's actually better, if you have one of these, to mount it as far forward of the keel. So you get it. You know it's coming before the keel hits it, but the point is I got mine below the behind the rudder.

Capn Tinsley: 1:21:51

It's really, really useful in shallow water because you can see if the depth is going up or going down, but not just the rate of, but you can also see the rate of the depth going up. What is, what is this right here? Oh, you can't see it, but that little thing that's sticking up that's a sunken sailboat oh so that's what they're trying to show you.

Rich Whitlock: 1:22:03

So so the top left. So this is the reason I like the screen show you. So. So the top left so this is the reason I like the screen is it's showing you three things. So this imaging, sonar, the real vision, rvx it's really cool. So the top left is a fish finder. So that's really it's low resolution, but it's great for like finding fish, because fish show up is basically big red things and I heard that's like the air in their lungs. I don't know what it is.

Rich Whitlock: 1:22:23

But the bottom left is the bottom left quadrant. That's called the down vision. So that actually just looks directly below you and it paints a picture of everything that you see and it looks sort of like 20 degrees off to either side, so it does have a little lateral movement in it, but that's a sunken sailboat. Um, the bottom right is what's called side vision. So this, this view, looks off to the side and it lets you and that where it's black, that's because it's it doesn't see that because that's covered by the down vision on the bottom left. So the down vision on the bottom left shows directly below you and then the bottom right shows you out to either side and so you can see the sunken sailboat you know.

Rich Whitlock: 1:23:03

Off to the right, on the on the bottom left, you can also see the mass sticking up and it creates a shadow. You see that horizontal gray line on the on the bottom right. That's the shadow, the sonar shadow of the mast. But it sort of shows you. Okay, this is what's below you and this is off to the side, and that off to the side one's really cool. If you're going through like a narrow channel or something, you can literally see where you are in between, like the channel as you go down it, and then the top right. That's trying to, that's trying to show you kind of what they call the 3d image. So it combines the down vision with the side vision and shows you a composite image of what the whole thing looks like it's like a cartoon it looks.

Rich Whitlock: 1:23:40

It looks kind of cute, it's it. It works better in theory than I've ever found at work in practice. Um, I just, I just cannot get it to work. So I have mine set up where if I'm in shallow water I'll essentially just have my left screen on the chart and the right screen on the bottom that basically down view on the bottom left and it works beautifully Like I've navigated thousands of miles in the Bahamas just using, basically just seeing cause on the Bah Bahamas. A lot of times it's like 10 feet deep and I just love to look down and just see where that is. And the other thing too it also serves as a backup bottom sounder, basically depth or fathometer. So I've got the main fathometer that came with the boat that also does the speed through the water, but then this one kind of serves as a backup to that as well. But it's just really neat to see and you can also tell the type of bottom you're over if it's sand, grass, rock just based on the quality of the return that you see on the bottom.

Capn Tinsley: 1:24:33

So that's kind of pretty cool. That's that would be handy.

Rich Whitlock: 1:24:35

That's super handy because you'll have a different, you know, sort of anchoring strategy a little bit if it's sand versus like grass like turtle grass doesn't hold it all Right. So that at least kind of lets you know what you're, what you're going into. So, um, but that's pretty much it. That's like everything I have on my little boat and, like I said, I sort of looked at something from an engineering perspective and a backup perspective, because on the submarine everything was about like redundancy and high reliability and maximum efficiency, and if you're underwater by yourself and something bad happens, you want to make sure that there's a way that you can, like you have some kind of backup for every critical system well, I wish you were.

Capn Tinsley: 1:25:09

Um, I wish you were here because I have some questions to ask you. Because I installed and this this is uh technical stuff. You know, when I got the boat it was raymarine and I didn't like the raymarine uh chart plotter, it was not in this as intuitive.

Capn Tinsley: 1:25:25

So I got my chart plotter, my garment, and put it on my on this boat and had the uh nema 2000 installed so it's got both and everything works, uh, but I never saw the air temperature or the water temperature ever again after I brought it to the new boat, and I don't know what that's about. Nobody seems to be able to tell me, but I used to use that a lot and I have been without it since I got the boat after my hurricane incident in 2020 and, uh, I mean it's.

Rich Whitlock: 1:25:55

It doesn't garmin read raymarine um, a lot of times, yeah, so raymarine's not, they're, they're not dumb. They'll make a bottom transducer or they'll make a wind speed indicator or something like that, knowing that they would rather have you just buy the Raymarine piece and use it on a BNG or a Garmin than have to have you have all Raymarine stuff to use it by itself. They might get some people who convert everything, but I think they're smart enough to know this should be plug and play, and so they try to plug and play it. And the common sort of clearinghouse, if you will, of that is the NMEA 2000 network. And so I would be surprised if you have a Ray Marine, basically instrument that's providing that information or that used to provide that information information it's still going across your NMEA 2000 network. We'll just need to work together to figure out like how to, um, how do we access that?

Capn Tinsley: 1:26:54

yeah, yeah, because, because I don't even know where it's reading from. I never knew it on the old boat, it was just always there yep, I never even thought about using the same transducers um there's probably a good chance that. Yeah, the transducers that came with the boat.

Rich Whitlock: 1:27:08

Yeah, and if you were getting that information previously, there's a good chance that it still is there. I bet you what we'll have to do, and I'm happy to work with you offline because on my chart plotter I've sort of figured out the most efficient or the maximum information with the least amount of clutter for each one of the viewpoints, the settings, so like I have speed over ground, apparent wind speed, depth and battery voltage. Those are like the four key, like principal statistics that I want to know at all times. So, but the point is is that I picked those and I told my screen like where to show up on it. Sure, so I'm sure there's probably a way to configure yours, um, so that we can see, like, the air temperature and the water.

Capn Tinsley: 1:27:48

I've been through it and I have not been able to pick it up. But, um, I need someone else to and maybe garmin can help. I don't know, but I just installed a new uh, garmin autopilot. It was an auto helm, which is raymarine, know so that one was starting to act up, so I just went ahead. I told the guys that work on my boat. I said I want to be able to. I want a remote for my, for my autopilot, and I've never been able to route it through the chart plotter you know, like, set it and have it follow it.

Capn Tinsley: 1:28:24

I've always made adjustments, you know, and I've gone from here to the keys every year since, and it works. I mean, it's just more of a luxury thing that you you know. Uh, it works. If you just make adjustments, it stays on course pretty well, especially now that I have a new one but it has a remote, so I can sit at the front of the boat oh, that's so cool.

Rich Whitlock: 1:28:44

Yeah, one thing I love about. So originally when I got my boat, I didn't really like that. It had one main chart plotter that kind of had a swivel on it. I felt that was, you know, like I don't know rarity, had a nine and nine inch chart plotter at each helm station. Uh, my last boat that was like so beautiful, um, but I missed that.

Capn Tinsley: 1:29:00

I've got this big one yeah, you get used to things just like the air and water.

Rich Whitlock: 1:29:05

I mean, do I?

Capn Tinsley: 1:29:06

have to have that? Probably not, but I, once you have it, you want it again.

Rich Whitlock: 1:29:11

So this is, this is the funny thing, though, about, about like having that, that the one pod that I can kind of swivel around, originally like on rarity, if I was sleeping, and I was sleeping up on the in the cockpit, just lying down on one of the, the.

Rich Whitlock: 1:29:23

You just turn it around to you I would have to get up, walk back to the the chart plotter, look at it and then walk back and go to try to go to sleep again. But so it was like it would wake you up every time you wanted to go check on something. But with cerilla I just angle that pod 90 degrees off to the side. I'll wake up every like 20 minutes. Look over, check the radar, make sure it's clear over. Check the radar, make sure it's clear, you know. Check the wind to make sure it hasn't shifted, and then just like right back to sleep.

Capn Tinsley: 1:29:50

Yeah, and if you have active captain you can have it on your phone and lay down and just look at it.

Rich Whitlock: 1:30:07

So don't laugh. So I have that. So that's the one. The thing I do like about the one of the maybe BNG, I'm sure it has this too. There's a Ray rain marine app and you can basically connect your wi-fi and because it's rain marine, it's basically it only works half the time, but I can connect my iPad to my chart plotter and control the chart plotter from down below. So if it starts raining, I just bring up my iPad, hook it up to the chart plotter, go down below and, especially if there's like a squall coming through or something where the wind's shifting like this, I'll just adjust the course or put it in wind vane mode or whatever.

Capn Tinsley: 1:30:32

Um, so I don't have to mess with it and and just control the boat down below, yeah, and then once I have the because I still don't have it all hooked up, uh, because you know what I've been, what's been going on in my life so I've kind of abandoned the boat for a little while. So I'm trying to get myself back on it. But, um, I've got to get the, the new garment autopilot all set up and and working correctly with uh and it cleared out some other settings. So last time I took it out, I no longer saw. No longer saw. Not only do I not see the air temperature and the water temperature, but also didn't see the depth or the oh, that's a problem and and it's there because it's on the one of the relay instruments.

Capn Tinsley: 1:31:17

It's there, but I think because they were messing with the the nema, it just it needs to be reset.

Rich Whitlock: 1:31:22

I'm a chart plotter. Yeah, depth and apparent wind speed are my two most important things.

Capn Tinsley: 1:31:26

Yeah, wind speed, and so I no longer have wind speed or depth but it's there, I just have to we'll figure it out.

Rich Whitlock: 1:31:35

I'm happy to help you, you know, offline and uh walk through it or something. I'm sure. Okay, there's a way to make it happen well gosh, we've had a very good informative podcast here.

Capn Tinsley: 1:31:43

Sure do appreciate, appreciate your expertise thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it well, we'll have to catch up. When are you going back to the boat?

Rich Whitlock: 1:31:51

I'm flying in probably. Let's see. I'll have my this weekend. I'm off, I just got back from the boat, so I'm staying in town for a week, if you can believe it, and then next weekend I'll have my kids, but the weekend after so I think like May 19th or so probably fly out.

Capn Tinsley: 1:32:07

So you'll go down, I'm going to take?

Rich Whitlock: 1:32:08

yeah, I'll fly into St Martin, pick up my boat from the mooring and then just sail it down to Grenada where I'm going to try to keep it. But I have some friends that I think are in will be in Martinique at that point, which works out really well, because one of the things I want to visit is I need to go to Antigua to see Nelson's Dockyard. That's one of the historical sites there that I've always wanted to see. And then, but I want to go to Martinique and I want to go to Montserrat, which where the volcano erupted and buried the capital city that's been described as a modern day Pompeii. I really want to see that, see if I get a tour of the exclusion zone.

Rich Whitlock: 1:32:45

And then I want to head down to Martinique, where this island is called Diamond Rock and it's very famous well amongst sailors because the British actually took it over to blockade the French in like 1800, and they set up cannons on this like 600-foot-tall like island and just stymied the french for like a couple years and they had a garrison of like 30 people on it and the french had to send like 3 000 sailors to like take it back. It was. It was unbelievable, and the only reason they surrendered was because their cistern, the, the water tank that they had on the island like started leaking and they all started dying of, uh, dehydration. Like how cool would it be to like see that you know in real life?

Rich Whitlock: 1:33:32

yeah anyway, but I'm gonna hit, I'm gonna try to hit those places on the way down to uh, to grenada all right. Well, and so did you see hayden and radine while you're in saint martin no, sadly I missed them, but um, I think they over in Antigua by the time.

Capn Tinsley: 1:33:46

I finally like okay, sad self over there well, they're gonna be back now that they're home and settled in there, we're gonna we're gonna do another, another really good podcast. They, like I said, they come very organized and they come with tons of information and I appreciate this today that you really came with some great information and some knowledge and some some know-how.

Rich Whitlock: 1:34:06

So thank you oh, thank you for having me on.

Capn Tinsley: 1:34:09

It's been an honor, all right so when you get to grenada or martinique, it'd be fun to have you on again.

Rich Whitlock: 1:34:15

You can talk about your, about your journey from, from saint martin for sure, and hopefully this time will be easier, because I'll be going straight south as opposed to, you know, against the trade. So so we'll see how that works, for sure, all right, yes, definitely. Well, we can talk about bottom paint. That's the next thing I need to like, okay okay, all right.

Capn Tinsley: 1:34:34

Well, thank you. And the way I end these is say salty abandoned out. Oh, you know, thank you.