Nice to hear from your voice of experience. It really makes sense to be able to get stuff safely stowed away.

My gut has been telling me the same thing about the panel size in the wind. That 120 is big enough to steer the boat... up into the wind. Maybe I'll talk my mechanical engineer son and his friends to do an engineering study on this and other designs. A couple things I do know already. I can't picture taking that thing down in the middle of the night with the wind hitting 50 knots and the seas getting rowdy. But stuff happens. I suppose it could be part of the routine to stow it at night. Not much benefit from moonlight. I might try it anyway. Or I could opt for the 80 watt version... but then the mount looks mighty expensive per watt.

I keep coming back to fastening panels to our cockpit cover. We'll probably have it up a lot in Mexico. But then getting it out of the way (see the weblink for more photos), sure is nice when sailing. If you can't see your sails, how can you sail well? With this solar panel project, I can't think of a better example of how every boat decision is a compromise. When can I get my solar sails?

Did you fabricate your own panel mounts? Commercially available?

What kind of towed generator? The only dual use one I knew about was the expensive DuoGen. Nice tip about the funnel, by the way.