The takeaway here is as a responsible mariner, always check your battery system before you go regardless of the setup, but have a plan in place for when stuff goes sideways. I installed an ACR just this winter and I love it. Why did i install it? i have a story behind that. Last fall my dad and I were hunting cohos offshore from Port Renfrew. if anyone on here was there at that time you'll know that there was an insane amount of shakers, so the downriggers were super busy. in general i always left my manual switch on 1+2 for daytrips and would switch to one battery only for overnight or renfrew trips offshore, but forgot to switch it back to one or the other as we sort of just "drifted away" from the inlet over the course of the day and next thing you know we were 10 miles away from it. So then, i look at my fish finder to find out I was down to 10V! (i have it so its always on the screen, but only useful if you are looking at it) so i told my dad crap, i think the batteries are dead. we tried starting the main and nothing (the kicker was already operating so we had that going for us at least). so we shut down fishing pulled everything up, and ran the kicker at full throttle back in the direction of PR against the current at about 3-4 knots per hour. I also shut down all electronics and isolated one battery to try to get it juiced up as much as possible. There was no one around us for as far as we could see. We did get the main started eventually and made it home just fine, luckily it was flat calm with no swell, a very unusual situation in PR. Lessons learned:
- Downriggers pull a huge amount of power. if you have two of them going every couple of minutes (shakers) they will eat at even the most awesome of battery setup
- Electronics also pull power during all of this
- Your kicker only makes about 4amps even at full throttle, and most people don't troll at full throttle
- Some kickers like the Yam 9.9 with E-start have no recoil. mine does, but i would be worried to not at least have that as a fall back. consider installing one if you don't have one
- The ACR would not have allowed this to happen to us
- All plotters have low voltage alarms with adjustable thresholds on them. USE THEM! I now do this with both my units and it is super helpful to give you an early warning
- It is amazing how quickly **** goes sideways even with the best planning. I have 3 batteries on board, wired vhf, portable vhf, 2 chartplotters with radar, handheld gps, satellite beacon and do a lot of pre checks of all my stuff but you still just cant predict every scenario.
Watch out for those shakers schools! Its a good advocation for kickers though. I think people who don't have one are crazy. Yes twins have double redundancy and can get you out if one fails but if your batteries are dead you will never hand crank a main to life, but a kicker you can. 4 knots is better than 0 knots!