One thirty-year-old sailboat. A thousand nautical miles down the BC coast. No fuel dock. This is the voyage the whole company is built on.
The bet
The bet was simple, and a little reckless. Take an ordinary thirty-year-old fiberglass sloop — the kind of boat thousands of owners are looking at right now, wondering whether to sink another repower into an aging diesel — pull the engine out, and put in its place the sun, a well-sized battery bank, and a model that says honestly how far you can go. The boat we bet on was SV Endurance, a 1972 Camper & Nicholson 35 out of Oak Bay. Diesel out. The equation in.
The rattle stops
It’s the feeling you have when you turn off the engine… you start with the boat rattling, and then you turn it off, and it’s peaceful. It’s so peaceful. Everybody on a sailboat knows that feeling — something that only an artist could describe.
Ed Wisernig, founder
Every sailor has lived that moment. Going electric does something quiet and strange to it: you never pass through the rattling, smelly diesel at all. The silence isn’t a reward at the end of the motoring — it is the whole of it, the only state the boat knows. That feeling is where this began, and everything measured below is only there to make it dependable.
A thousand miles, accounted for
In the summer and fall of 2024, SV Endurance sailed more than a thousand nautical miles — from Oak Bay up to Desolation Sound and back, unsupported. The feeling had to survive being measured, so we measured everything.
The headline finding reframes the whole question of range: over the 1,000 NM trial the array harvested more energy than the motor consumed — the 48 V bank never fell below 50%. On a single kilowatt of solar. You stop asking “how far before I run out” and start asking “did I end the day with more than I started.” On this voyage, again and again, the answer was yes.
Two numbers explain why. Held at an unhurried 2.5–3.5 knots, the hull barely sips — 200 watts to a kilowatt, an appetite the sun can match through a daylight passage. And with the motor silent and holding course, autopilot use climbed from around 60% under diesel to over 90%: the person at the helm quietly became the person keeping watch.
The full day-by-day accounting lives in the ship’s log. A thousand miles, no fuel dock →
What broke didn’t
Across the whole voyage there were zero critical electrical failures. A multi-week passage is where marine systems show what they really are; this one simply kept running. That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work.
But we will not tell you nothing broke. The transom-mounted outboard cavitates in a high sea state — it loses its bite in rough water, and that makes it unreliable for open, blue-water passages. We are not hiding that limit; we are pointing at it. It is the exact reason a robust, integrated drive matters, and it is a large part of why this company exists. The lesson is worth more than the win.
The doctrine
Here is what the trial actually proved: not that the boat can do anything, but an envelope — a set of documented limits, measured on real water. So this is the doctrine the whole business is built on. We sell inside that envelope, and we tell you where its edges are before you spend a dollar.
That honesty has a valve, and we keep it open. You can still carry a generator aboard — for a genuine emergency, or to punch through a six-knot chop with three knots of current setting against you. We would rather hand you a true limit than a slogan. A promise you can check is the only kind worth making at sea.
Who we are
Radical Flux is the marine work of Wiser Marine Technologies Ltd., a small company out of Victoria, British Columbia, founded and led by Ed Wisernig. The model that sized SV Endurance was not drawn on a whiteboard and left there; it was built from theory and then made to earn its keep on the water, over real miles. That is the whole difference we sell. Most of the market sells you components. We sell predictable, honest performance — and we sailed the proof before we built the pitch.
The same equation that sized this voyage now runs on land and on the water, too — one equation, three deployments →. When you’re ready, point it at your own hull: run the configurator →