Adam Prudhomme
Editor
On Wednesday Phil Boyer steered Soul Cat next to his backyard dock on the Napanee River, officially marking a successful completion of a 23 day, 942 km journey-all via solar power.
Boyer departed his Napanee home earlier this month on a course for Georgian Bay in his 18-foot custom built catamaran, which is powered by 1,500 watts of solar panels affixed to the roof. His successful voyage makes him the first to ever complete the route on 100 per cent solar power.
“Overall it was great,” said Boyer. “The people I met along the way were just fantastic. What would happen is a posting would go up on the Trent-Severn Waterway Facebook page, which all the boaters and cottagers seem to follow. All of a sudden the next day people would say ‘oh yeah I got a picture of him at such and such a lock.’ It’d be like that all the way up and down. It’d almost be like Where’s Waldo.”
Soul Cat has a top speed of about 11 km/h but typically travels at a pace of about eight km/h. While traveling at a lower speed the solar panels can actually charge while cruising.
As word of his historic journey spread, he picked up quite the following of fellow boaters.
“I would stop at a place for the night, like Hastings,” said Boyer. “I would have dozens of people, both cottagers and residents coming up to me and talking to me. One woman brought up vegetables for me out of her garden. Just unbelievable the attention that it was getting.”
The trip wasn’t without its challenges.
“It was quite the experience, it was an adventure,” Boyer recalled. “(It was) 23 days. It could have been sooner but we had three days in a row of not very good weather. That slowed me right down.”
Some problems were to be expected, others were much less predictable.
“Weeds were a problem on my boat so I have to come up with some sort of a skeg for controlling the weeds,” said Boyer. “I did break a prop, I hit a rock. That caused me a bit of a hiccup. I got caught in a couple of storms, that was a little bit unnerving. I got caught in the middle of Rice Lake, which is a big lake, and a storm hit. It wasn’t very nice, thunder and lighting and heavy wind. Going across Lake Simcoe, I was in to about 20-30 km winds. Heavy breakers coming at me. It took me five hours to go from the exit of a canal to Orillia, which is only 24 kms.”
Despite the challenges, Soul Cat was able to take what was thrown at her. Weather did cause Boyer to cut his trip a bit short, turning around about 30 KMs sooner than he had originally mapped out.
“It’s been a very windy month and the winds on Georgian Bay were causing a lot of havoc with boaters and I thought I’m not going to chance it in my small boat because I didn’t have a lot of power so I thought I’d terminate at this one island north of Honey Harbour,” said Boyer, noting his original plan was to go as far as Go Home Bay. “My total distance was 942 kms.”
Taking the lessons learned for his latest journey he does plan some slight modifications to his boat-mainly a bigger battery and a more ‘mosquito proof’ covering for the canopy.
Now safely back on shore, he’s already planning his next big adventure. Among those plans is a trip along the Rideau Canal followed by a much more ambitious goal of a triangle loop of Napanee to Ottawa to Montreal to Lake Champlain into the Erie Canal into New York State and then returning home via Gananoque. All told that journey would take him about 1,600 KM over 36 days, all once again strictly on solar power. That will require plenty of planning on his part however and one he doesn’t figure to attempt for at least two years.
In the meantime he’s got plenty of photos and a captain’s log to go through as he enjoys his latest record setting voyage.