Anyone live aboard a sailboat and motor everywhere?

[sailorboy1]

Yeah most start thinking that.

[Fore and Aft]

I would say lots of people motor more than they sail on their sailboat. Judging by the high amount of engine hours on alot of sailboats I survey.
I think living on a sailboat has a bit of romance about it and the potential to be able to sail around the world apeals to alot of people. Even if all they do is motor around the bay 90% of the time.
Cheers

[markpierce]

Originally Posted by Fore and Aft

I would say lots of people motor more than they sail on their sailboat. Judging by the high amount of engine hours on alot of sailboats I survey.
I think living on a sailboat has a bit of romance about it and the potential to be able to sail around the world apeals to alot of people. Even if all they do is motor around the bay 90% of the time.
Cheers

They should have dodged the dream and obtained a motor boat having better accommodations.

[RaymondR]

My normal chasing-the-sun routine takes me north when winter south easterlies are blowing and I then wait until the northerlies of the summer months blow me back south again. As I get older I am tending to motor more but in the past I would sometimes only use 20 - 30 gals of diesel during a whole years cruising. I cruise about 2,000 nm a year over a 7 - 8 month period. Probably most of the other boats I observe motoring are multihulls. Comes of living in a place where you can drink the water out of the tap and which is almost perfect for cruising.

[wyb2]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

What drove me to sail was range.
You just can’t cross Oceans under power with anything that I can afford.
Plus being under sail is so much more stable, so much more.
When that motor goes off and we are sailing, it’s just relaxing.
I don’t know about you, but with Yanmar running on my boat, it sounds like we have a lawnmower in the salon, not a good way to relax.
I hate running the thing, but love it’s miserliness and reliability.

100x this. Maybe newer boats are better, but on ours motoring is annoying from the cockpit, and unbearable below (loud and hot).

A few people have mentioned reliability, but I find the sails to be much more reliable.

I don't really get the premis. If you want to motor, get a motor boat. A trawler will burn a little more fuel, but it will go faster, have a longer range (under motor), have less draft (water and air), and the whole thing won't be designed and built around a mast and rig that you aren't using.

[Pelagic]

I have a motor sailor and that's what I primarily do

It has a big six cylinder Perkins in a nice soundproofed engine room, connected to a well protected propeller, driving a full keel with a comfortable foot in the water, when you encounter a seaway .

It sails efficiently at winds above 15 knots, less than that it quietly Motor sails at hull speed with the Perkins at around 1000 RPM

Able to cross any ocean with an easy dry motion that is far superior to a trawler, she can be sailed by one due to her all furl schooner sail plan.

Accommodations and ergonomics are good enough for us and the redundancy of both sail and power makes any tradeoff in upper decks worth while.

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[billknny]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Now we are cruising, and I have come to find that we motor more than we sail.

Really? Literally more miles under motor than under sail? Why keep the sailboat? I am not trying to be a wise ass, but after all a motor boat is much better at, well...., motoring.

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Think of it this way, you have been waiting a week for favorable crossing conditions sea state wise, you get them, but no wind to speak of and the grib files don’t show a favorable wind for more than a week. Do you crank the motor and go, or sit for who knows how long waiting?
Or do you go when there are six ft, short interval seas, when the wind is good and get sick and beat the boat to death?
[

We sit and wait... we have nowhere to go that we need to rush, and we are rarely stuck in places we don't like, and we are happy to sail in light winds at 2 or 3 knots of boat speed. We COULD motor at 6 knots if we wanted to, we carry over 250 gallons of diesel, but it rarely is as much fun as sailing.

We will happily wait a week to avoid days of upwind sailing. We will sail 1000 miles out of our way to avoid a week of upwind work. If we are waiting for more than two weeks for favorable weather, we see that as a sign that we are probably going the wrong way, and reroute.

In 3 years we have covered roughly 20,000 nautical miles. We motored about 10% of that. And much of the motoring was actually done while we were out fishing.

Not that we are "right", and anybody else is "wrong", what ever you LIKE to do is the right cruising style for you. It is just worth pointing out that there are cruisers who sail. Heck, we even have been know to go out on a daysail for fun!

On this topic, just the other day over the course of several hours we left a 40-something foot Lagoon cat in our wake. Off a windward shore, so calm seas, we were on a parallel course, he was motoring, we were sailing on a deep reach, 20 gusting 25 knots of wind, we were doing 8.5 to 9.5 knots. He was doing a steady 7.8 or so under motor alone. If he had sails up, surely he would have been going a LOT faster than we were.

It just lead me to wonder... if you motor a catamaran in those conditions, when would you EVER actually go sailing???

[markpierce]

Originally Posted by billknny

...

It just lead me to wonder... if you motor a catamaran in those conditions, when would you EVER actually go sailing???

It is an effort to hoist/control sails. Many do not want to be bothered. People just want to imagine their dream. Some people are able to live it.

[mikedefieslife]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

In the end sailing and cruising on a sailboat aren’t the same. In the cruising world you don’t out go onto a reach for a few hours then turn around onto a new reach and come back. In the cruising world you need/want to travel 100s of miles to a choosen destination or a planned bail out spot along the way, while dealing with weather changes, tide and currents, entering unknown places etc. you aren’t out for a pleasure day sail, you are trying to get somewhere and do it safely.

Yep, sailing is just a mess about (like going for motorcycle ride with no specific purpose), a bit of a jolly. Cruising is a way of life. Each unto their own.

[thomm225]

The bad thing about simply motoring is that you really don't get any exercise. The older you get the more exercise you need.

One of the many reason I wanted a sailboat at first was for the "speed" and exercise. (and the competition)

I raced beach cats for 15 years in races up to 100 miles and offshore maybe 12-14 miles. It was a great workout especially when trapped out or racing single handed with a spinnaker.

I also "cruised" them in the ICW from Panama City, FL to Biloxi, MS and out 12-14 miles in the Gulf in races to Horn and Ship Islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Having already owned 6-8 small power boats in my teens and early twenties for use in the Chesapeake Bay (the part of the bay that's about 30 miles wide) and Atlantic Ocean, I already knew what "motoring" was about and it gets old quite fast since it's so simple

With sailing, it's fun to plan your trips according to wind, tide, and weather as a Coastal Cruising Weekend/Vacation Sailor who has to be back at his home "port" by a certain date

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by billknny

Really? Literally more miles under motor than under sail? Why keep the sailboat? I am not trying to be a wise ass, but after all a motor boat is much better at, well...., motoring.

???

I disagree, depends on what you mean by better, faster, yes.
Actually we usually motor sail, I almost always have the main up and if we are at least 25 degrees off the wind, the Genoa too.
Maybe it’s just our bad luck, but it sure seems wherever we are headed is where the wind is coming from.
Before cruising, we always sailed. What is different about cruising is you now have a destination, and that often throws a wrench into the sailing plans.
I’ll admit, if the winds are great, but they come with 6’ short period seas, I’ll sit it out at anchor and wait until the seas abate. I often miss good sailing because they sea state is more than we would enjoy

[belizesailor]

One way to spot a cruiser: they are motoring to their next anchorage with their sun awnings still deployed.

[wyb2]

Originally Posted by mikedefieslife

Yep, sailing is just a mess about (like going for motorcycle ride with no specific purpose), a bit of a jolly. Cruising is a way of life. Each unto their own.

The analogy that comes to my mind is buying a convertible. Motoring is like putting the top up. We all do it at some point, cause having the top down in a thunder storm kinda stinks. But motoring with the wind 15 knots on the beam in protected water is like leaving the top up on a warm sunny day on a senic road. If you are never planning on putting the top down, why not just buy the hard top?

(Oh and also your car magically uses no fuel when the top is down)

[mikedefieslife]

There's that sweet moment when you shut down the engine and you hear the water splashing up on the hull and the sounds of nature. Though I imagine that there is a large body of the cruising community that would happily have a trawler or other style motorboat if they were as fuel efficient as sailboat and had the same range for the same cost.

I suppose anyone who can afford a used car can afford an old mono, or 70s era cat, but few can afford the diesel to run a similar size motorboat.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by mikedefieslife

Yep, sailing is just a mess about (like going for motorcycle ride with no specific purpose), a bit of a jolly. Cruising is a way of life. Each unto their own.

Excellent comparison (at least in the USA). I would be willing to bet better than 95% of motorcycle owners do not commute more than 5% of the time on the bike.

If you start talking road trips over 500 miles, I'm betting it's less than 2% who use the motorcycle as the primary transport. Lots of RV's carry a motorcycle for pleasure rides but very few actually just go on the motorcycle.

Very similar with sailing vs cruising. A biker may ride to work on the occasional perfect day but not many commute in January in Chicago on the bike.

It's great to say you aren't on a schedule but when a 30 mile trip goes from a leisurely 6 hour run to 16-20 hours of relentless tacking up small channels with the wind on the nose...that same freedom that lets you not have a schedule lets you crank up the engine.