Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife:

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

I suppose every wife in any generation wants their husbands to be safe, but each generation has a different approach to risk and adventure. I know my wife would be resolutely opposed to any voyage like this (says the man with a dream of sailing a Hobie Cat across the Great Lakes...perhaps when my son is grown).

This page also includes a 100x136 pixel high-resolution color digital photo of the boat, and the year: 2002.

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/potter.html

There's also an update page with a GIF animation of the weather accompanied by the text "WARNING!!! file size: 1.5 MBytes"

From the article:

> The batteries were charged for about 1 hour daily using a Honda EU 1000 gasoline generator coupled with a 3-stage battery charger. The generator burned 1-1/2 gallons of gas in 24 days. ... There was no backup power source for charging the batteries.

24 hours of runtime and 1.5 gallons of gas equate to 0.625 gallon usage per hour. From the spec sheet, an EU1000 generator has a 0.55 gallon tank and can run for 6.8 hours at 225W output, that's 0.081 gallons per hour, so I estimate that the generator was operating at about 174 watts, given it ran for an hour that's 174 watthours per day.

23 years later, anyone would assume that your default source of 174 watthours per day would be a solar panel. A single 2x3 foot rigid panel would do ~100W peak and see the equivalent of 4-6 peak hours per day, easily beating that requirement. Any serious sailboat (even a little trailerable 19' coastal boat like this one) would have a whole array powering lighting and sensors and radar/radios and telemetry and would budget much more than that.

Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat