We continued on with a schedule of running the motor for an hour at Midnight and again at 4:00am every night. We had plenty of fuel so this was annoying but feasible. As we continued on over the following days and nights, the battery capacity fell from 4 hours to 2 hours, then to minutes, even as we began turning off everything but the AIS and the autopilot at night… It became apparent that if we were to continue, we would have to run the motor each night (the whole night) until the solar cells kicked back in. We had lots of fuel, but not THAT much fuel… The other option was to hand steer thru the night shifts the rest of the way. We still had ~2000 miles to go.
I had to make a decision and though I really wanted to finish the passage, I had the safety of my crew and my vessel to account for. Ultimately, I made the call that we would abort and return to Mexico. It was a hard decision, but I believe it was the right decision. We had sailed 800 miles and 7 days when we did the sad turn back toward Mexico.