Chepa is a Fidji catamaran, built by Fountaine Pajot in 1991. While some of her history is foggy, I think that in her first years, Chepa was in a charter company in Greece. An American couple acquired her in Europe and spent 5 or 6 years cruising the Mediterranean.

End of 2002, Chepa crossed the Atlantic on a chip carrier. A bit strange considerting that she's fully equipped for blue water. We found her in July 2003, and on August 1st the same year, Philippe and is son Guillaume left Ft Lauderdale, FL for St Augustine, FL, some 300 miles North. Chepa went back to Ft Lauderdale around Thanksgiving the same year for various small upgrades and a big one: two new Yanmar 30 hp to replace the two Volvo 18 hp ready to give their last breath.

Chepa has 3 separate berths, 2 on starboard and one on port. a 4th one on port was converted into a storage area. In between the two hulls is the main saloon, with a large table for 8 and a full galley.

Sail area is about 1,000 sqft, plus a spy of 1,000 sqft. A 10ft dinghy equped with a 15 hp is on davits between the two hulls, and Iacquired a small kayak I keep on deck, as well as a windsurf.

Chepa weight 13,000 pounds and has a 3 ft draft. She carries 190 gal of fresh water, and is equiped with a watermaker. 60 gal of fuel give her a motoring range of about 1,000 nm.

She is 39 ft long, with a beam of 21ft.

Winter 2004 :

The two 18 HP Volvo show 4,500 and 10,500 on their hourmeter, and they haven't been maintained too much. They leave us and make room to 2 Yanmar 30YM rated at 29 HP, coupled to SD20 saildrive ( a major mistake as you could read later). Two high power alternators rated 120 A are also installed ( another mistake).

December 2004 : by now we put almost 450 hours on the new engines, and here are the first comments ... the Yanmar are very silent, run on very little fuel - about 1/3 of a gallon / hour for both at 2600 rpm, 7 knots. No vibration unless the propeller are not perfectly clean. The SD20 are flexible mounted, and they amplify any screw vibration.

High output alternators are a malediction, the belt last between 10 and 60 hours. Early death of the alternator is the drop on the camel back, and we change them for two 80A Balmar in November.

Yanmars engineers did not do very good when it come to fitting a high ouptup alternator, one need to get a custom arm to fit them, the original one being ridiculeously too short. Get a forged arm, otherwyse, it will fail on you.

Maintenance design could get some help. First, the secondary fuel filter is idealy located to spill everything on belts and engine block when the filter needs to be cleaned or changed. Solution is to relocate it, or to had an extra one in a place where a normal human hand can access it ..

Second - and the worse - the saildrive SD20 can not be serviced in the water. Oil change require the boat out of the water. One has the choice between beaching the boat - not always that easy or even possible, or spend $300 for a haul out ... each 100 hours ! OK for WE cruising boat, but this is a real problem for long term cruisers ! Would have been so simple and so cheap to have a simple oil line from top to bottom in the drive ....

Bateries are exchanged for AGM, 2 x 8D and 4 x 4D, totalling 700 Ah.

Spring 2004 :

The bome is too low and has a tendency to hit the dodger, we move the gooseneck up by a feet. Two jib tracks are added on the outside deck, allowing a better easier jibe control for broad reaching in general, something a catamaran does a lot!

A large stainless steel arch is added between the two pontoons, which are reinforced to take the stress load. It holds the dinghy, 4 solar panels @ 80 w, and a KISS wind generator. Plus all the fishing gear, and some MOB one. This is giving us a lot of comfort and additional room, since the back deck is now free of davits.

A note concerning the KISS generator. Mine is centered, against all recommendations. I wanted to center it, as the spinning blades are really scaring me to death. I was told not to center it because the "air flow is disturbed by the mast". I took my chance and rightly so. First the blades are as far away as they could be, this is called safety, especially the day something goes wrong and one break loose. More chance to survive the missile! Second, I could not see ANY air flow problem, at the anchor facing the wind that is. I tested it with some water spray : air flow is near undisturbed 5 feets after the mast @ 15 knots of wind. So no problems when anchored.

Big advantage is underway. On any tack, if one tunes the mainsail properly, it spills good, none turbulent air right into the KISS. At apparent wind speed.

November 2004 :

One of the propeller is travelling free on its axis. After checking further, the alumium prop got literally machined by sand finding its way between its back side and the front side of the drive. Time to upgrade, and while doinfg so, to increase the pitch a bit - the engines had no problem to reach their max rpm not even on WOT. At the same time, some folding propeller would be nice, wouldn't it? The price tag for feathering ones just seemed to have too many digits, for an advantage over folding ones which seemed minor - they are more efficient in reverse, not my favorite way to travel anyway.

So we installed two stainless JetStream, one inch more in pitch then the current ones. Results to come....

Finally, the foot of the main sail is recut with a better angle, and all the small glitches repaired, including new battens.

January 2005:

Well, this folding props do wonder. Too early to talk about reliabity but ....

- underway running one engine, we get 1 1/2 knots better, for the same rpm, and sensibly the same fuel consumption.

- undersail in light condition between 7 and 15 knots of wind, a huge benefit of almost 2 knots in light air, and 1 in medium one.

- Going upwind : as the boat goes a bit faster, it makes less leeway, and get closer to the real wind. Add to that the new main cut, easier to control and tune, and we now have honorable upwind cruising performances (still miserable ones by any triangle racing standart, but we are not doing this too much so who cares?).

The new alternators seem to have a friendly relationship with their Vbelt, no more problem to mention. At the same time, since solar panels and wind generator seem to produce enough juice for our need, I now really wonder about the interrest of high output alternators. Faced again with the choice, I would just stick with the original 60 amp ones...

AGM batteries are a question mark. No maintenance is great I must say. The fact that they do not self discharge is fantastic for a WE cruiser, but almost meaningless for a longterm cruiser, as in our case, self discharge is not an issue. Issue is their number of charge / discharge cycle : 300 accroding to the maker. For a WE cruiser, even using his boat each WE, that's 6 years (assuming charge during the week). For us, well.... the batteries are charged at day end, thanks to the solar panels, then are at their low point in morning, etc... 300 cycles is only 10 months...

At this time, they seems to work OK. However, a year ago, they would stay over 13.5 V for 24H from full charge, now they only do so for 3 or 4 hours. As you can read everything and the contrary on how to maintain them - you must equalize ; you must never equalize is equally shared - , it seems that time will soon tells if this was the proper choice for our cruising life.

December 2005 :

Battery are almost 24 month old. When the engine are running, the alternator controller cut off when the charge is maximum ; right after, batteries read 12.8 v. If one cut the engines, stop solar panels and wind generator, they will go to 12.1 in about 6 hours. I think that the boat power consumption is in the range of 150 amps / day, so 6 hours is about 40 amps. 6 more hours, voltage will drop to 11.5 v .... and big mistery to me, will remain in this range for a full day, then reach 11.2.... and stay there for another full day... I never got the gutts - balls??? - to push the test further. And at 11.2 v, the yanmar will still crank and start. (Any AGM knowledgeable person, please help me there!)

The most demanding time is a light air night cruise, on a broad reach with some sea and a warm weather. The autopilot works a lot, the fridge works a lot, the lights are on, the instruments too, and here you have your max load. The solar panels are in the dark, the engines are off... and on a broad reach, apparent wind is low, so the KISS is not producing - it really needs to in the 15 to 20 knots to get some real output..

Well, in such a night, the results are the following. Batteries will read 12.5 at noon, 11.6 at mifnight and 11.4 at sunrise. And story repeats itself the next day.

Folding props are, after a year, still the same charm.

Alternators works fine, however the main support - the one with 2 screws - managed to break the two screw holding it to the engine block. Repairing this, I still can not believe that Yanmar only use two screws to secure the main alternator support. Not even high tensile screws.

The following pictures show a bit more.