About

About On A New Tack

We’re Mike & Sue Pail, retired professionals turned full-time sailors, sharing our adventures aboard SV Mira. Our blog documents marine systems, boat builds, and voyages across the globe.

We created this site to help fellow sailors with practical “how-to” guides—especially marine electrical systems, isolation transformers, freshwater pumps, and more. We’re straightforward, no-nonsense, and honest—just like our blog content.

In 2024 Mike realized there was a serious need for Victron Consulting and starting offering that service to fill the gap. Some of that content is on this blog too.

We hope you learn, laugh (sometimes when things go terribly wrong), and join us on the water!

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Victron Isolation Transformer - How to lower the output voltage

Re-configuring a Victron Energy isolation transformer This is a companion article to a YouTube video covering the same topic. What are they and why do I need one? Victron Energy isolation transformers are often used on boats that connect to shore power in order to provide a means of providing isolation between the shore power and the AC power that exists on the boat. The transformer sits in between those two worlds and isolates that two power supplies through magnetic flux and an air-gap. The reason this is needed on a marine vessel is because without it, small leakage currents can flow between the earth ground for shore power and the "earth ground" connection on the boat, which is usually connected to water through a propeller shaft, out-drive, sail-drive or sacrificial zincs. That creates a loop and that small leakage current greatly accelerates any galvanic corrosion that naturally happens. Current flows through the water because of the salt content, or even in fresh-wat...

Common Questions from other Vision Owners

Update: 7 Oct 2024 Before we get to the blog article, which I wrote in March of 2023, I want to let you know that I just found out about Google's NotebookLM, which is an AI powered tool that allows you to create a Podcast style audio piece based off of whatever input you provide, in this case, the following article. Here is a link to the "podcast" it created . Honestly, I'm blown away! Original Article follows... Introduction I received a list of questions from Steve and Lisa Heidenthal (Hull #13, Sla'inte) about how we set up our boat, where we purchased things in SA and instead of just answering them for Steve, I thought I might as well make a blog article to also help others. All of these answers will be from the following perspective: sailing the boat over from SA to where-ever having the boat built with strictly 230V/50Hz power If the boat is being shipped, I wouldn't suggest buying much in SA, as you will have an easier time finding more options (and us...

Using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device on a boat as your own personal Cloud.

Living on a self-sufficient boat without giving up The Cloud?! If you are at all like me, you've begun to rely more and more on one or more Cloud Services. Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and many, many more basically all offer the same solution: "You have digital things that are important to you; you pay us a small amount per month and we'll manage keeping it safe and protect you from hardware failures and data loss." I firmly believe that hosted cloud storage is one of the great conveniences that just about anyone under the age of 70 should be using. The solutions are downright cheap, given how much storage capacity you can get and how much you would pay to get that data back if you lost it. I have used all of the above and my provider of choice is Google Drive, though we also use Apple iCloud to automatically backup our iDevices, as least for now. Life 2.0 We will still have a cloud storage provider when we set sail, but what are we going ...

On A New Tack

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