John was born and brought up in Bermuda and started sailing as a child, racing locally and offshore before turning to cruising. He has sailed over 100,000 miles, most of it on his McCurdy & Rhodes 56, Morgan's Cloud, including eight ocean races to Bermuda, culminating in winning his class twice in the Newport Bermuda Race. He has skippered a series of voyages in the North Atlantic, the majority of which have been to the high latitudes. John has been helping others go voyaging by sharing his experience for twenty years, first in yachting magazines and, for the last 18 years, as co-editor/publisher of AAC.
In Part 1 and Part 2, we took a deep and considered dive into analyzing the electrical loads on our boats and thinking about ways to reduce said loads through smart systems thinking.
(If you have not read those articles, please do so now, otherwise this one will make no sense to you.)
In this chapter we get the payoff for all that hard work: How to calculate optimal battery bank size or, alternatively, how to live with the bank we have. And I have built a spreadsheet to make the whole process easier.
Let's dig in: 