Before the advent of combustion power, traveling by boat meant sailing, paddling or rowing—exhausting, but no engine exhaust. Nowadays traveling without tailpipe emissions does not have to be tiring; that is, if you harness the clean power of sunshine.
Ed and Eileen Pauley, a retired couple from Iowa, did exactly that last summer, traveling from Olympia, Washington, to Wrangell, Alaska, and back, with many stops at pretty places in between. Their boat? The 42-foot solar-electric catamaran Electric Philosophy.
The Pauleys were easy to spot with their form-follows-function craft that has a big deckhouse and an even bigger “solar farm” on the cabin top—it occupies more than 500 square feet. The couple, both in their late 60s, were not the first ones to traverse the Inside Passage on solar power, and the distance they covered, while impressive, can’t hold a candle to the 115-foot catamaran that in 2012 became the first solar-powered boat to circumnavigate the world. But even without grand superlatives, their achievement is remarkable. As cruising rookies, they took an electric craft
