The Inside Passage to Alaska is one of the great small-boat journeys: hundreds of miles of fjords, islands and tidal currents. In spring 2021, father and son David and Alex Borton made it in a boat with no fossil-fuel engine at all.
Wayward Sun is a 27-foot (8.2 m) wooden-hulled boat built by Devlin Boat in Olympia, Washington. Its roof carries a 1,700 W solar array that charges six Torqeedo Power 24-3500 lithium batteries, which feed a Torqeedo Cruise 4.0 electric pod drive. Everything the boat used on the trip came from the sun.
They left Bellingham on 25 May, reached Ketchikan, Alaska on 13 June, then continued at a gentler pace to Glacier Bay (pictured) and finished in Juneau on 8 July. Over the 45-day passage they were underway on 38 days, averaging about 32 nautical miles a day at 3.7 knots. The Bortons believe it was the first solar-electric voyage from Washington to Alaska.
The trip shows what a modest solar boat can do on a long coastal journey: no fuel stops, no engine noise, and an easy pace.
Technical data
| Crew | David and Alex Borton (father and son) |
|---|---|
| Builder | Devlin Boat, Olympia, Washington |
| Hull | 27 ft (8.2 m), wooden |
| Solar | 1,700 W roof array |
| Batteries | 6 × Torqeedo Power 24-3500 lithium |
| Drive | Torqeedo Cruise 4.0 electric pod |
| Voyage | Bellingham → Ketchikan → Glacier Bay → Juneau, 25 May – 8 July 2021 |
| Average | ~32 nm/day at 3.7 kn, 38 days underway |
Photo (Glacier Bay, July 2021): SSal7 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sources: Ocean News · DeeperBlue · Marine Industry News