November 4, 2012
And sailboats are stupid. I’m not saying that cruising, the act of traveling by boat to wonderful places, is anything less than incredible. I’m just saying that getting to these wonderful places in a sailboat makes little sense to me. I find sailboats to be both impractical and uncomfortable.
As an engineer, I look at sailboats as they are today, and can’t see anything more than a minor improvement over ancient designs from a time when human life was cheap and suffering was the norm. Sure, the sails are more efficient and the rigs can now be handled by fewer (and weaker) people, but does moving the a task from a gang of strong men to a lone watch stander really make it any easier for the one now tasked with the job? Sailboats can now go into the wind where before that wasn’t possible, but speaking as someone who’s done two long, up-wind passages, I’d rather it weren’t possible (though the stock prices of those selling seasick medicine would suffer).
It doesn’t seem to me that any sailboats out here are any better or more comfortable than any others. All my blue-water experience is in a 38′, light displacement boat. I used to believe that maybe I’d be more comfortable in a larger, or heavier boat, or maybe one with a different hull shape, or maybe one with more freeboard, or some other magical difference. But I’ve been interrogating the crews of many of the boats out here in the South Pacific this season and they all seem to echo my feelings, though few put it as bluntly as “sailing sucks.”
Sure, there are some, and by some, I mean two, who claim to have had comfortable ocean passages but it’s the male part of the crew who is satisfied (sorry for the sexist comment, but it just happens to be the way it is). Questioning the more sensible, female part of the crew gives a totally different picture. A radio conversation one night during a passage with the contented captain summed it up nicely when he said his conditions were “excellent, excellent.” In the background, his partner could be heard screaming about needing to use a five-point technique to move about the boat – hands, feet, and teeth! Yea, sounds just great! His boat is a 44 foot, 32,000 pound boat that couldn’t be more opposite, design wise, from ours.
Maybe a bigger yacht would be comfortable? My hopes for that were dashed when the gang on a 55′ Tayana told tales of passages every bit as miserable as those we’ve made.
It seems that the problem is that there exists a very narrow range of sea and wind conditions where sailboats are comfortable. If the wind goes much above 20 knots, things on board get bad and you must go through some variation of reducing sail that often involves activities that bring survival into question. If the wind goes much under 12 knots, with swells running, the sails flap back and forth, forward motion mostly halts, and it’s time to turn on the engine. Most sailors don’t like running their engines, for good reason.
Engine installations on sailboats seem to be an afterthought with little attention paid to sound and vibration insulation, nor adequate space allotted to maintain the engine. The result is a noisy, underpowered, poor substitute for a power vessel.
Even if you find the magical 12 to 20 knots of wind, it often comes with big swells from multiple directions that slap the boat around and roll and pitch it about. The stabilizers on a sailboat are the sails. If the wind is strong enough, not from directly behind or ahead of the boat, and the seas are reasonable, sails do stabilize the boat and the motion can be nice, though you often spend days at a time leaning over at some uncomfortable angle.
As a bit of an aside, we have had comfortable passages in a sailboat but it’s not been the case during this trip across the South Pacific. We were promised days of wonderful, trade-wind sailing, just us and the ocean, with lazy days spent dreaming up ways to cook the many fish we’d catch. We only fish when the conditions are nice and we only fished two days during this 6,000 mile trip!
“But I love sailing!” is what we hear people say. Sure you do and good for you. You love it when you can drive to the boat from your comfortable house in your comfortable car which you only do if the conditions are what you deem suitable. You get on your boat and go out for a few hours, after which time, you get back in your comfortable car, drive to your nice house and have a long hot shower with your virtually-unlimited supply of hot water. If something breaks on the boat, you come back to the dock to deal with it when you feel like it (or call the repair shop). I love that kind of sailing too.
Would you really love sailing if you left the dock, not to return, no matter what the conditions, until you were done with a 22 day passage? If you had to fix whatever broke immediately or do without? If it was too rough to even take a shower for days at a time? For me, the answer might have been yes – when I was 20 something. Now that I’m an old guy and I like comfort and safety, the answer for me is no. I don’t love sailing anymore. Maybe I would again if it were for a few hours at a time in select conditions.
So what’s the answer for getting across oceans comfortably, safely and affordably? Are power boats a better alternative? I don’t really know but lets be honest about why more of us aren’t out here cruising in ocean going motor vessels… they cost too much and we can’t afford them. You can buy a good sailboat (if there really is such a thing) for less than one tenth of the price of current, passage-capable power boats – and then there’s fuel costs. At even a mile a gallon, which is optimistic for many power vessels, we’re talking about a $150,000 fuel bill for a 25,000 mile circumnavigation. Ouch!
But does it have to be that way? Do power boats have to be so expensive to buy and operate? I guess they do if you need six cabins, a formal dining room, a living room, and four heads. I guess they do if you need to travel across oceans at 11 or 12 knots or if you need an extra cabin for the pastry chef.
What if there was a power boat more like the boat we’re cruising in right now? We have one room that we sleep and live in. We have one head. After 22,000 blue-water miles, we’ve averaged 5.2 knots. What if you built a power boat that was as small and as slow as the sailboat we’re out here cruising in now? Could that be comfortable and economical?
I think it might be possible. We get almost 10 miles per gallon under power alone at about 5 knots. Without sails, we could do without the big keel sticking down in the water, slowing us down and we could do without the 8000 pounds of lead that keeps us upright when the sails are full. Sure, we’d need to carry a lot more fuel and carry the weight of that fuel. If we wanted a 5000 mile range at 10 miles per gallon, we’d need to cary 500 gallons and that’s about 4000 pounds. Losing the 8000 pound keel, we’re ahead of the game already. If we could only get 5 miles per gallon, with the same 5000 mile range, we’d need 8000 pounds of fuel – an even trade for the weight of our keel.
Why 5000 miles when the longest passages are about 3000 miles? We’ve learned that you can’t always count on the availability of fuel at any given port. The extra range would allow a lot of freedom.
Why go so slow? The slower you go, the less fuel you use. Steve Dashew, a boatbuilder I really respect and admire, suggests that you need to go 11 knots to be safe – to be able to outrun bad weather. We can’t now. Most sailboats out here can’t. Sure it would be nice to go that fast, but I can’t afford it. If we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s safe to be out here making 5 or 6 knots, than wouldn’t it be just as safe at the same speed in a power boat? I’ve been mostly satisfied with that speed so far. I could live with that in a power boat.
Obviously, the less fuel you use, the more economical the voyage. For us, I think the threshold of practicality is at about 5 miles per gallon. For a 25,000 mile circumnavigation, at $6 a gallon, we’re talking about a $30,000 fuel bill. Painful but if you consider that this expense might be spread out over 3 to 6 years, it’s not quite so bad. Ten miles per gallon makes the situation twice as affordable. Consider that against what we now spend on sails and rigging.
Some would say that they couldn’t bare to listen to engines drone on and on for weeks at a time. They’re thinking of the engine noise in their sailboats. There’s absolutely no reason that the engines need to be loud. We were aboard a boat that had a generator about as large as the engine that might be required to propel my hypothetical power boat and I remember a heated argument between the couple as to whether or not anyone had turned off the generator. Was it still running? No one could tell from the sound. It was well insulated to prevent both noise and vibration. Hydraulic or electric drives, or even just thrust bearings with universal joints, good engine mounts and sound-proofing make it possible to have main engines that are almost that quiet.
Notice I talk about engines, plural. I would want two engines, each one alone capable of driving the boat at about 5 knots. I’d want that for redundancy and reliability, to offset the wear that you’d get on a single engine, and also so that each engine could be smaller, quieter and easier to “sound proof.”
That redundancy would be an important safety factor in getting a broken boat with no sails to a place for repairs. The danger here is that a fuel problem could incapacitate both engines, leaving you stranded in the middle of the ocean. Some would argue for a secondary sail rig to use in this situation. I don’t think I’d want to spend the considerable money for such an auxiliary sail rig, nor would I want the weight of that rig aloft causing the boat to roll more.
Can I really get home now if I lose my sailboat’s mast? It happens. Sailboats lose their rigs and few of us carry enough fuel to get to the next port under power alone. If that were to happen, we’d kludge some kind of sail arrangement and drift slowly to some port. I think I’d be inclined to use this same “Kon-Tiki” get-home system on a power boat. Just make like Thor Heyerdhal and drift until you get close to land, maybe with the aid of some kind of portable mast, temporary rigging and small, emergency sail.
Without a sail, you’d need some other way to stabilize the boat. I’ve heard the roll of a power boat, without any kind of stabilizer, can be pretty bad. Without a sail rig, there seem to be two options: outriggers that are used to drag stabilizers (called fish) on each side of the boat, or active, hydraulic or electrical stabilizers. Since I’ve seen the movie “Perfect Storm,” I think I’d opt for the active system. Yes, they are a more complex but I’m sure well proven systems exist by now as they are very common.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that this kind of economical, practical ocean-going power boat could be designed and built. We’ve seen some boats that come close, most recently, a power sailor called Ice. It is a very big, very heavy boat and under power alone, burns about two gallons of fuel per hour at about six knots. It seems that by reducing the size a bit, and maybe slowing down a little bit, my 5 mpg minimum goal might be within reach – maybe even my 10 mpg dream.
I was told that a boat like Ice can be purchased new from it’s builder in China for $650,000 US. I can’t afford that but if you take away some of the size and a lot of the luxury, maybe it could approach affordable.
So now you know my dream… to be sitting in a nice wheel house, watching the ocean go by as we slowly make our way between distant island destinations. To be out of the weather, relaxing in a plush helm chair (OK, that’s one luxury I wouldn’t skimp on). Sitting comfortably, hour after hour, out of the sun, out of the wind, out of the rain. To not have to get up in the middle of the night to reef sails, tack or jibe. To travel without leaning to port or starboard for weeks at a time. To leave on passages when there isn’t enough wind to fill sails and after arriving, glide my keelless boat over sparkling, clear water so shallow that it would make a sailor cringe. -Rich
Update: here are two related posts:
