Making a Solar Bracket and Leaving Cadiz
Three days to build a new solar mounting frame from scratch, before a weather window slams shut and Paikea’s first real open-ocean passage begins.
How the old frame broke
The original solar frame took damage from something every liveaboard sailor eventually experiences: an anchor that didn’t hold. Riding at anchor in Portugal, the anchor lifted clear of the mud, and as the boat spun around with the tide, the chain wrapped around the shank and pulled it free entirely — the boat dragged, drifted back toward another vessel, and in the process, the solar frame took the hit. No damage to the boat itself, but the frame was bent and no longer fit for purpose.
A material problem with a three-day deadline
The plan was simple in theory: repair and reuse the existing aluminium frame. In practice, Cadiz had nowhere selling aluminium stock longer than 600mm — nowhere near enough to build a frame for the newly ordered solar panels, let alone repair the damaged one properly. With the weather window for the passage to the Canaries already closing, there wasn’t time to source material from elsewhere.
The fix: spare C-Tech carbon sail battens, the same material already proven throughout the refit for exactly this kind of structural improvisation. Rather than trying to remove and replace the old frame under time pressure, the new carbon frame got built and mounted directly over the existing one — laminated joints, bolted connections into the original structure, solid enough that it’s arguably overkill for what a solar frame actually needs to carry. Better an oversized fix built in three days than an elegant one that misses the weather window entirely.
The math nobody likes: doubling the weight up top
The new solar panels needed mounting somewhere, and the number worth sitting with is this: the additional solar capacity weighs almost exactly the same as the entire carbon fibre hardtop it’s being mounted onto — deliberately doubling the weight sitting high on the boat, in the one place weight matters most for stability and righting moment. It’s not a decision made lightly, and it’s exactly the kind of trade-off worth understanding if you’re planning your own solar upgrade: more panels means more power, but weight placed high on a catamaran has real consequences for how the boat handles, not just how it looks.
Leaving on the tide of a weather window
With one of three panels wired and drawing power — engines not yet charging the batteries, solar picking up the slack — Paikea left Cadiz for the Canaries, following the coast of Morocco on the way to Lanzarote. This was the first genuine open-ocean passage since the front beam, rudders, and folding propellers had all been tested individually. Everything now had to work together, under real offshore conditions, for days at a time rather than a single afternoon’s sea trial.
Reading the weather, and chasing the breeze
Routing for the passage came from PredictWind, watching true wind speed patterns to plan around a favourable window for flying the fractional spinnaker — downwind with the kite up remains the favourite point of sail on this boat, and the forecast looked genuinely good for running most of the passage that way.
Three days in, conditions delivered exactly what was hoped for and then some — boat speed climbing from a comfortable seven to eight knots up to bursts of eleven and even twelve, chasing a genuine speed record for the boat. But fast breeze doesn’t stay put forever: as the boat accelerated, the realization set in that the wind was receding offshore, meaning the faster Paikea sailed, the longer she’d stay in that favourable pressure — provided the course held further out to sea rather than closer to the Moroccan coast. Reading that shift correctly, and adjusting course to chase it rather than just react to it, is exactly the kind of real-time weather routing that separates a fast passage from a lucky one.
Running the fractional spinnaker at genuine speed brought its own moments — reefing decisions made on the fly, careful attention to wraps and lines under real load, and the everyday texture of family life at sea layered in alongside it: a lumpy, uncomfortable night making sleep hard to come by, a bit of good-natured sparring about who got the rougher ride, and kids old enough now to be genuinely useful crew on deck rather than just along for the trip.
The takeaway
None of the individual modifications — the front beam, the rudders, the new solar setup bolted together in three days under real time pressure — mattered until they all had to work together on a real passage, in real conditions, for days at a stretch. This was that test, and everything held.