The short version: the electrical system didn’t break, and one mechanical limitation did show up clearly. Both halves of that sentence are the point, so here’s the long version.
Across a multi-week, thousand-mile-plus voyage there were zero critical electrical failures. The four-bus architecture — solar, propulsion, house, shore — ran the whole passage without a critical fault. For a first full-season trial of a bespoke solar-electric system, that’s the result we’re proudest of, and it’s a measured one, not a claim.
What did reveal a hard limit was the propulsion’s physical mounting. The transom-mounted outboard cavitates in high sea states — when the stern lifts and the prop loses clean water, thrust drops out. In sheltered and moderate conditions it was a non-issue; in a real seaway it made the outboard unreliable for blue-water passage-making. We log that plainly because it’s the most important thing the trial taught us.
And that lesson is the reason the product exists. Cavitation on a bolt-on outboard is exactly the failure mode an integrated, properly-immersed drive is meant to eliminate. The trial didn’t just prove the energy story — it pointed straight at what robust electric propulsion has to get right.
So the fix is already in build. The FY26 boat moves to a permanently-submerged POD drive as the all-weather primary and demotes the outboard to fair-weather maneuvering — the cavitation problem designed out, not papered over. When that setup has its own sea miles, they’ll be in the log too.