Today we find ourselves in Filucy Bay at the Longbranch Improvement Club marina. It’s quiet, even with the healthy dappling of homes along the shoreline. On a Tuesday, this place feels (pleasantly) deserted.

The marina is clean, well kept, and the area beautiful. So, despite the lack of showers or bathrooms, we will return here again.

Tomorrow we’ll head up the bay a half a mile and anchor for about a week. Sarah and I both need time for our creative pursuits and we have found that sitting peacefully in a beautiful bay is an excellent way to do just that.

We have learned that the indigenous tribes who visited this bay felt it was very special, believing it to be an ancient place. I feel it too.

Of note. We’ve traveled about 90 miles over a three week period. Obviously we aren’t in a rush.

Yesterday we arrived in Mayo Cove and secured a mooring buoy off of Penrose Point State Park. The buoy is closer to shore than my chart shows, but there was plenty of water under us.

We’d been keeping an eye on a large thunder cell working up from the south and I knew it meant the wind and rain were on their way. We have only used a mooring buoy once in the last 4 years, so I was a little on edge as the storm approached. 

The leading edge arrived like a freight train, dark and ominous, with winds was much stronger than I expected. While we watched, Carr Inlet (where we had come through a few hours before), was quickly worked into a frenzy by large, wind driven waves.

I’m not sure what the park buoy is rated for, but everything held and within a few hours things began to settle down. We still had a steady wind at midnight, but it was comfortable. 

Today we woke to sun and peaceful seas.

A short post on DC-DC chargers and why I’ve installed one with the new lithium battery bank.

WARNING: Lots of technical, little explanation. You've been warned.

Odyssey has an old-school alternator with internal regulator. This means that while the engine is running, the alternator will try to deliver everything it can as fast as it can until the battery is charged.

Regular battery chemistries like AGMs have a basic resistance that (usually) keeps the alternator from overworking itself and failing due to heat. Lithium batteries have a MUCH lower resistance and may just cause that poor alternator to melt, especially at low rpms.

What to do? Keep the start battery an AGM and then install a DC-DC charger between it and the lithium house bank. The charger will only operate when the engine is running and with the output rated somewhere below the full load amps of the alternator, it will keep the alternator from working too hard. The charger also isolates the house bank from the start bank so an ACR isn’t necessary. Our alternator is rated for 50 amps and the DC-DC charger is 30 amps.

An alternative would be to replace the alternator with something like a Balmer setup that has a programmable external regulator and will protect the alternator from overheating, but this is a much more expensive solution than the DC-DC charger and can complicate start + house bank systems.
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We just finished up a week anchored in Quartermaster Harbor, and have now sailed into Tacoma’s Dock Street Marina looking to laundry, shower, and provision.

The question on everybody’s mind is how that fancy lithium battery bank did. SO let’s get to it.

It did great!

While anchored we purposely weren’t careful about how much power we used, running everything, including the heater, as often as we wished. On average we were in the hole about 40 Ah each sunrise. I can’t tell you the total power we used each day because the solar panels charge the batteries and supply most of our needs during the summer daylight. At our next anchorage I’ll turn off the solar charging to get some meaningful numbers on usage.

The whole system worked very well  and I really like monitoring all the activity on my iPad using the Victron app.

On a side note, the 30A DC-DC charger also worked great. This device charges the lithium bank, but for specific reasons only while the engine is running. More about that in the next battery update.