Before the advent of combustion power, traveling by boat meant sailing, paddling or rowing—exhausting, but no engine exhaust. Nowadays traveling without tailpipe emissions does not have to be tiring; that is, if you harness the clean power of sunshine.
Ed and Eileen Pauley, a retired couple from Iowa, did exactly that last summer, traveling from Olympia, Washington, to Wrangell, Alaska, and back, with many stops at pretty places in between. Their boat? The 42-foot solar-electric catamaran Electric Philosophy.
The Pauleys were easy to spot with their form-follows-function craft that has a big deckhouse and an even bigger “solar farm” on the cabin top—it occupies more than 500 square feet. The couple, both in their late 60s, were not the first ones to traverse the Inside Passage on solar power, and the distance they covered, while impressive, can’t hold a candle to the 115-foot Tûranor PlanetSolar catamaran that in 2012 became the first solar-powered boat to circumnavigate the world. But even without grand superlatives, their achievement is remarkable. As cruising rookies, they took an electric craft through some of the world’s most challenging waters, without a genset or plugging in, while steering clear of blunders and calamities.
They didn’t sail, but they acted as if they would, checking wind and tide frequently and adjusting course and route planning. They cruised by day, when the northern summer sun produced more than enough power (even in overcast conditions) for the battery banks and two 20-kW motors from Electric Yacht that pushed Electric Philosophy to a net cruising speed of 5 to 6 knots. If that wasn’t enough to buck a nasty current, so what? When they had to wait for the next window, they dropped the hook to relax, read, browse the Web via Starlink and dinghy ashore for walks.
“We really had the luxury of time,” Eileen said. “We had no reason to rush, [but] because you’re moving slower, you drive more hours. Our longest day was 84 miles or 18 hours, literally sunrise to sunset.” Power draw (i.e. fuel efficiency) on that trip was 3.5 kW per motor, or 7 kW total. The couple left Ketchikan, Alaska, at 4 a.m. with a 99 percent charge on the propulsion batteries and tied up at the customs dock in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, at 10:30 p.m. that night with 42 percent of power remaining, because the solar panels charged the batteries while running.
Traveling in this fashion takes much less energy than putting pedal to the metal, but getting there takes longer. How much longer? “Not more than 20 or 30 percent longer than anybody else,” Ed interjected. “Most trawlers do seven and a half, eight knots, some nine.” On the upside, no rush means more time to see beauty along the way. For the Pauleys, that included Behm Canal and Misty Fjords National Monument Wilderness.
Were there dicey moments? Yes, one. While fighting a nasty chop in Knight Inlet, water was thrown over the top of the cabin, but that was it. If that sounds boring, the couple says great, because less stress equals better recreation. “The biggest advantages of the electric boat are quiet running, reliability and low maintenance,” Ed explained. While lack of fumes and engine noise are obvious benefits of their boat, upkeep and dependability are often overlooked. “Think of it, we ran 3,500 nautical miles and had a burnt-out anchor light and one loose drive belt as our total maintenance on the boat,” said Ed. Besides, smooth sailing (pun intended) requires good seamanship, including planning, preparation and fixing stuff before it breaks.
Ed said he was surprised by “how doable it all was,” but that comment needs to be put into perspective. Both Pauleys, who met in a Minnesota rowing club, have considerable and complementary technical skills but had no history of cruising at sea. Ed worked as a research scientist in new product development for Penford Products Co., a corn wet-miller, and had modified an Airstream trailer, which the couple uses to go asphalt cruising. To achieve grid independence, Ed installed solar panels and lithium batteries, so that’s quasi the prequel to Electric Philosophy. But that did not change the couple’s circumspect approach that tends to err on the cautious side. That’s Eileen’s department, who joked about being “the corporate worry wart, who was finding out how things can break,” during 35 years as a test engineer at John Deere.
During their first full season they dialed the boat in for the Alaska adventure, ticking off 3,000 nautical miles around Puget Sound and the islands on both sides of the border to Canada. No days were lost to unavailability, but Ed replaced the original battery management system that had several issues. They hauled out several times to address problems with a Cutless bearing and shaft seals, and they tested different propeller and engine configurations. True to form, Eileen also had created an illustrated owner’s manual as a reference guide for troubleshooting and tracking down gremlins that can hide in operating systems or firmware, electric contacts, connectors and cables.
What about back-up power? After the first season they swapped a propane generator they never used for two 3.6-kWh Ecoflow batteries from Costco. “They’re very compact, they can be charged from 110V and 12V, or with portable solar panels,” Eileen said. “That gave us a source of power that was not connected to anything wired into the boat. If everything went to crap, we could use these batteries to fire up electronics and phone chargers to call for help.” But so far, they’ve never had to.
Drawing on the Airstream experience, Ed designed a 9.5-kW solar system for Electric Philosophy, with 25 monocrystalline panels on the cabin top, which added 1,000 pounds of weight. To avoid shading, the radar mast was mounted centerline on the bow and a sponge/squeegee combi-tool on a long handle helped to keep the panels clean. Ed also built the boat’s four battery banks: two for the house loads with 82 kWh and two for propulsion with 164 kWh of total capacity. He stuck with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which he used for the Airstream and prefers over lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), which still is the industry standard for almost all electric cars and boats, consumer electronics and power tools. “[LFP] batteries are less energy dense than NMC, but have three big advantages,” he pointed out. “They are not subject to thermal runaway, making them much safer to use. They are less expensive to produce since lithium is the only expensive and somewhat rare mineral. And they last longer, maintaining capacity over a much higher number of charging cycles.”
“Because he’d done all the solar and batteries on his Airstream, he started saying, ‘oh, maybe I could do this on a boat,’” said Ed’s cousin Phil Hallin, a software engineer and philanthropist who lives in Port Townsend, Washington. “The batteries he picked for the Airstream were under his bed, that’s how safe he felt.”
Hallin was a catalyst for and early supporter of the Electric Philosophy project and became the namesake of the boat (the Phil in Philosophy). Visiting him with their Airstream rig, Ed and Eileen attended the Wooden Boat Festival in 2017 and a talk about hull efficiency and charging propulsion batteries exclusively with solar power. They also learned about Sam Devlin, whom they commissioned in the fall of 2019 with the build of their stout 41-foot, 8.5-inch plywood-epoxy catamaran, a craft for the challenging coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest, with living space and cockpit in the deckhouse and drivetrains, systems, batteries and general stowage down in the hulls.
Devlin, who builds one-off boats in stitch-and-glue technique and also has catamaran ferries in his portfolio, was a good fit for the Pauleys’ plans, and permitted them to work alongside his crew of boatbuilders to install all the batteries and electric components of the drive train. Devlin also designed solar-electric launches for Sustainable Energy Systems, a company in Upstate New York that was involved with Solaris, a 24-passenger solar-electric tour boat built and operated by the Hudson River Maritime Museum. In 2021, David and Alex Borton, the principals of the firm, went one way from Bellingham, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska, aboard Wayward Sun, a Devlin-built solar-powered 27-footer.
“One realization from that project is that while solar electric is certainly possible and viable as an option in today’s technology, you have to be careful about speed, as anything close to full displacement speeds can gobble up a lot of energy,” Devlin wrote in a design comment. Another concern is weight discipline, especially on a catamaran. “A constant mantra for this project was to avoid building decisions that introduce more weight, [thus] offsetting redundancy advantages of upsized anchor gear, water and waste capacity, stores, tools and equipment.”
Despite these concerns, the pounds kept piling up on Electric Philosophy, which tips the scale north of 26,000 pounds when fully provisioned. Accommodations feature wooden trim and accents from Iowa black walnut and offer million-dollar views through the large windows. There’s the master suite aft and a dinette forward that converts to a double bunk for guests. Other amenities include a warm-water shower, a gravity fed head and a galley with reefer, induction cooktop, espresso maker and an electric griddle. The latter is Ed’s weapon of choice to whip up eggless buttermilk blueberry pancakes that are nearly as famous as the boat.
At the 2023 Wooden Boat Festival, Electric Philosophy was one of the attractions on her return from Alaska. Throngs of visitors filed through the boat and admired its purposeful simplicity. Among them was naval architect Tim Nolan, who called the boat “well-executed, a good example for electric power and a successful design that fits cruising needs.”
As we puttered out of Boat Haven for a spin, it felt a bit like sailing, but without the work. The Port Townsend waterfront slipped by in slo-mo and conversation did not require shouting. Later, aerial snaps revealed the true size of the solar array on the cabin top. “If you make a decision to use the boat for a long time, it is your home,” Eileen said. “We certainly are not camping, so we draw a lot of power and that’s why Ed put all these solar panels on.”
Going places at a measured pace, in style, without emissions and plugging in is what this boat was designed to do. And that is exactly what it does.
This article was originally published in the January 2024 issue.
