How does it perform in a BC winter?

The honest answer starts with what we haven’t done. Our proof — a thousand nautical miles, unsupported — was sailed in the summer and fall of 2024. We have not yet run a full Pacific-Northwest winter passage, so we are not going to hand you a July graph and call it February. When the winter data exists, it goes straight into the log, numbers and all.

What we can tell you is how the boat is built to behave when the sun is thin — because that was a design assumption, not an afterthought. SV Endurance carries a 1 kW array on a high-voltage 100 VDC bus feeding a 24.48 kWh propulsion bank at 48 volts. On a bright day the panels do the work. On a dark one, the bank is a reservoir you draw down slowly. The system was never sized for “the sun always shines” — it was sized so a run of grey days doesn’t strand you.

The discipline that makes winter workable is a floor, not a full tank. Over the 1,000 NM trial the array harvested more energy than the motor consumed — the 48 V bank never fell below 50%. Half the bank is a reserve we hold to, not a number we chase to zero. Shorten the days and that floor matters more, not less: you plan the run against the charge you actually have, and you keep the reserve deep.

There is also a lever winter hands you that a diesel never did: speed. At 2.5–3.5 knots the boat draws somewhere between 200 W and 1 kW — against roughly 3 kW to push the same hull to a diesel-style 4.2 knots. On a short winter day, easing off half a knot can be the difference between arriving with the bank up and arriving with it down. The trade is real and it is yours to make.

So: no winter slogan, and no fabricated winter curve. What we can do is show you the envelope for your boat, on your cruising ground, across the seasons — which is exactly what the configurator is for. Run it, watch the daylight budget shrink through the year, and decide with the numbers in front of you.

Can I motor at 6 knots?

Yes — and that’s the wrong question to stop on. You can drive this boat at 6 knots. What matters is what 6 knots costs, because the price in power is not linear, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with range anxiety and a flat bank.

Hull drag climbs with the cube of speed. Ask for a little more boat speed and the power demand doesn’t nudge up — it wall. That cubic wall is the single fact most first-time electric owners haven’t internalised, and it’s the exact thing our configurator was built to make visible. The whole point is that you should see the curve before you buy, not discover it offshore.

Here’s where the wall bites. At 2.5–3.5 knots SV Endurance draws between 200 W and 1 kW — a load the solar array can sustainably match in daylight. Push to a diesel-style 4.2 knots and the draw is already around 3 kW. Every fraction of a knot above that costs disproportionately more, until you’re spending the bank far faster than the sun can refill it. Six knots is available; it is simply expensive, and it’s honest to say so.

Which is why we don’t sell speed — we sell predictability. Competitors sell you a motor and a top speed; we sell you the honest power-speed-range curve for your hull, so the boat behaves exactly as the numbers said it would. For most passages the win isn’t going faster, it’s knowing precisely what a chosen speed does to your range and your reserve.

And for the day you genuinely need to punch through — a hard chop, a foul current — that’s a planned exception, not a daily habit; keeping a backup aboard for exactly those moments is a choice we’ll talk through openly. Want to see your own boat’s cubic wall? Run it in the configurator and watch the range collapse as the needle climbs.