Most companies bury their failures. We’re going to put ours in the log, because the most useful thing the thousand-mile trial produced wasn’t a triumph — it was a limitation, and that limitation is the reason Radical Flux exists in the shape it does.
What went wrong
SV Endurance drove through the trial on a transom-mounted Torqeedo Cruise 6 kW outboard. In a flat calm it was faultless. In a high sea state it cavitates — the transom lifts, the propeller finds air instead of water, and thrust stutters just when you’d most like it steady. For coastal daysailing that’s a nuisance. For a genuine blue-water passage, it’s a line you don’t want to cross on an outboard.
Why we’re glad it happened
That single problem drew the map for the whole product. A propeller that stays fed in a seaway can’t hang off the back of the boat — it has to be integrated, sitting deep and permanently in the water. The trial didn’t just prove electric propulsion works; it showed precisely where a bolt-on solution stops being enough and a designed one has to begin. You can’t reason your way to that finding from a spreadsheet. You have to go to sea and let the ocean tell you.
So the boat is changing. In Cadboro Bay the outboard is being demoted to what it’s genuinely good at — fair-weather maneuvering — and a permanently submerged POD drive is taking over as the all-weather primary. Same energy model, same battery discipline; a propulsor that doesn’t leave the water when the water gets interesting.
An honest limitation, met with an engineered answer. That’s the loop, and we’ll keep running it in public. The system it’s teaching us to build is worth a look.