Bread (hauled out in Fairlie, Scotland)
by Kate and Hamish Laird

• Planned route this summer: Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Greenland, Scotland
• On board: Kate and Hamish Laird, their children, Helen (4) and Anna (3), Jason Fitschen, and up to three guests on each leg of the voyage.

	The joys of being ashore: Helen swings off a dockline hanging from the gantry.

We have a toaster!

A boat on the hard is never an easy place to live: everything that makes her work as a boat revolts against being blocked up on beams and wedges, shuddering in the wind, with no place for the washing-up water to go.

But there are compensations, and a steady supply of 240v power is one of them. We've set up Seal to run on 240 as well as 120 shore power, and so a 240 VAC toaster was one of the plans, a special treat to help us get through the refit, bilge cleaning, painting, and inventories. Toast! The girls shriek with glee when it pops out.

We could, of course, have a toaster that ran off the inverter – this particular toaster is 1000 watts, which we could handle. The thing is, the batteries would soon need charging, and who wants to run the charging engine during breakfast? We could also make toast over the diesel heater or the propane stove with one of those four-sided boat/RV toasters. I even have one. But it's better known around here as the "Bread Burner". So we usually do without toast when off cruising.

When we're afloat, we have very few "How can you possibly live without it?" kitchen appliances – no microwave, no coffeemaker, no fridge, no freezer, no dishwasher, no trash compactor, no watermaker, no blender, no Cuisinart, no washing machine, etc. But since moving aboard Seal, we have expanded our notion of what we require.

Number one on the list is the breadmaker. For this summer's four month expedition to Greenland, we brought enough flour to make 44 loaves. Not enough. Next summer, I am provisioning to make 75 loaves. Hamish spent a great deal of time experimenting on the bread mix (and he continues to revise it as we meet new brands of flour), and we've come up with a good recipe, which we mix in 10-20 pound batches and pre-measure into bags.

The breadmaker has driven much of our electrical thinking. Originally, when I was doing the electrical design for the boat, we had hoped to have an electric dive compressor, but the startup loads for that were driving the entire electrical design, and didn't makes sense for something we would use an absolute max of about twenty days a year. We rearranged our thinking to a petrol-driven compressor, and the breadmaker rose ascendant as the primary electrical monster.

The main thing about breadmakers is they work best on sine wave power and need the correct hertz. That drove our inverter purchase – we needed enough watts to power the breadmaker through the cooking cycle - we could also have gone with an AC genset of course, and we were advised by plenty of people to do this. The lone voice in the wilderness was Steve & Linda Dashew's Cruising Encyclopedia (available on this web site): build a DC genset instead and make use of the inverter. This appealed to us for numerous reasons:

Redundancy: We have two alternators on the DC genset and we have the identical one on the main engine, so we can swap them around (plus, we have a spare under a bunk as well).

More readily repairable: Even the most remote places (or perhaps especially the most remote places) generally have someone who's pretty good at alternator repair. An AC genset is a mysterious black box that we know nothing about. We could learn, of course, but I'd rather be studying the charts and weather for the coast of Greenland.

Safety: Our main electrical needs in terms of amps are the keel winch (155 A @ 24 VDC) and the anchor windlass (160 A @ 24 VDC). If we have main engine problems, we can still raise the keel and the anchor with ease on the genset, without relying on an AC/DC battery charger (ours, fairly good sized, has a 75 Amp maximum, so it would be flat out and there would be a huge load on the batteries to pull up the keel or the anchor). I don't like running anything up to its rated maximum, especially black (or in our case silver) boxes with lots of teeny tiny electrical connections that I don't understand at all.

We can, of course, pull the keel (using a hand winch) and the anchor (using the primary winches) up by hand, but, if one has engine trouble and has to sail out of an anchorage, there is already enough going on. It also means we're more inclined to sail off the anchor recreationally, just to remind ourselves that we can. We'd never do it if we had to lift the anchor by hand.

Having the batteries and inverter sized to run most loads, as long as the batteries have been recently charged, gives us a lot of freedom and quiet. For example, if we have just come in from a long motoring session, the batteries can handle baking the bread, running a vacuum, or powering a big drill without having to turn on the genset. This is a big luxury: There's nothing worse than motoring for hours, finding a beautiful peaceful anchorage at the end of it, and having to crank up the genset.

We generally organize the bread making around the charging cycle. Ideally, we start the genset about half an hour before the baking begins (kneading and rising take almost no electricity). The alternators kick out their max power for ten minutes or so, and then when it's backed off to absorption rates, the breadmaker starts its demands for 30 amps, and the genset stays loaded. Diesel engines hate running without a load, so this way we keep the max loading on the engine for the most time. The diesel is burned regardless, meaning we can turn what would be wasted diesel into bread.

Most important for bread making, there is no transition between inverter power and genset power. If we had an AC genset, we'd only want to run it for the high amp baking cycle, but even a momentary power glitch like the one between switching AC power from the inverter to the genset would crash the breadmaker.

And diesel is much more easily available than propane. Propane on a world-roaming yacht is a huge hassle, so the more we can do to cut down our dependence on it, the better. (We are intrigued by the idea of a ceramic top diesel stove that we just heard about from some of our clients, but it's too late for us at the moment, with a brand new propane stove.)

Even ashore, we're using the inverter to drive the breadmaker – it needs the 60 Hz, and the shore power is 50 Hz. (We have a battery charger just for when we are on the hard; it accepts both 50 and 60 Hz; the inverter acts as our frequency converter.)

Despite the joys of toast and unlimited power, and the fun of having a swing off the gantry, it's high time to get back in the water.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.