Is It Cheaper To Motor Or Sail

How do you get any work done?

I like the kite idea and always assumed sail was cheaper than motor. Then again the only boat I've owned was a rubber raft with oars.

Nothing puts fabric and motor together like an SES or hovercraft, and good on fuel if staying away from thirsty turbines of the 1960's. However I'd rather be in a SES than a hover when the seas and wind picks up.

This is a nice discussion to follow.

 

Is It Cheaper To Motor Or Sail
Even if some people do not like it, I like to get back to the thread.
I think it is a very interesting thread if keeping in line, because it is the kind of question which can interest everybody.
What cost a lot on a boat is the system, what want the owner, and the ancillaries outside the boat.
A lot of these cost are the same for both, motor and sail if you go on a marina, and have a ship yard taking care of your boat.
If you do a lot yourself, and you can avoid marina the cost is going down rapidly.
Boston has a great advantage, let say on me, he can take care of his engine himself, he knows that like the palm of his hand.
If the boat is conceive on the drawing board for very low maintenance (the greatest cost) both sail and motor start with a good chance to be low cost.
For that you have to design with the knowledge of what works, what don't, what it's not useful, and what is necessary, and if possible don't buy anything at Waste Marine, and make yourself almost all the fitting.
With this miser spending attitude the boat will be not to expensive and it will be a good start for living aboard on a budget.
As for consumption for a motor boat, small (this is a relativity, depending of the family) and lean is of course the way to go, less friction, less hp, less fuel. It is that simple. The cargo weight on a family boat is predictable, so no need to have an overweight boat. Lean and light. the last I designed and built , and running the northern west coast is a 50' by 14' weighting 12t. Double planking cedar on fir. Not really lean but quite light. I will have preferred 13' wide.
Remembering that grounding can be very heavy as the size grow, the minimum size needed will save a lot on effort and money.
A small engine from a truck let say in case of Boston, is a good solution since he start with almost a freebee and know how to transform that in a perfect marine engine.
Now if nothing unnecessary is attach to the engine, the horse power still full.
And I think her is the problem. A lot of motor boat have a lot of system attached to the engine, lowering considerably the hp.
As to put a small rig on a motor boat, it is very low cost. The secret is the same, do it yourself with material readily available.
The small rig as an advantage, he keep the nose of the vessel in the wind, making the and leaving the anchorage easier.
It allow to have a safety net. And yes the mast and rigging can be $200, but for that you have to know whet you are doing.
Then the price of the gallon will go higher, so we have to be prepared to have leaner and more efficient hull, than the bloating plastic motor boat from manufacturer which are a nightmare in efficiency.
Its a give and take, very difficult to make a line. Yesterday motoring was cheap, tomorrow?
A lot of middle man want a piece of the cake, making pricing of everything, mostly freedom, going up and up.
Choose you poison, but remember the boat by Weston Martyr: The 200 pounds millionaire.
This book, everybody should have read it. A masterpiece.
Daniel

 

Exactly as Daniel says.....

On sailing north of Georgia Strait.....
No, it's not the trade winds....it's different.....that's what sailing is all about....dealing with the conditions at hand.....some take great pleasure in this. It's flat calm this morning, a friend (one of the boats in the picture above) is off to Vancouver. His boat is a 35' engineless gaff cutter....so he rowed out of the bay working with the tide....I can just see him out there ghosting with the big Genoa poled out....he'll get to Vancouver later today having had a wonderful stress free day.

On the cost of sailing....
A displacement power boat will be cheaper than a sailboat if you are buying things new in a store. If your sailboat is going to have an inboard diesel and your powerboat is going to have the same power plant, the sailboat will be more expensive. But that's if you are buying the quasi-racing sloop rig and sails. Buy a used engine and build your own low-tech rig for less (far less) than the cost of a new engine, or new rig and sails. Hell...one can build a rig for the cost of one (new) modern self-tailing sheet winch.

If you are buying a boat to cruise the archipelago, a used production sailboat will be far cheaper than a used powerboat...both to buy and to use. That's why there are lot's of them out there, and I would bet they each spend more time each year away from home......because typically those in sailboats are of a different mindset than those who are operating powerboats on a tight schedule.

 

your screwing up my whole decision making process here Tad
I could pretty much make everything associated with the rig
I have excellent woodwrights skills if I do say so myself and am pretty good in a forge as well, can't weld for beans though.
Rope and sail cloth is what I'd end up buying but the only motor sailor Ive found that even remotely appeals to me is this one



thing is its significantly less livable than the motor yacht
given the area of interest and that it rains there pretty much every day I thought being out playing with sails and lines might get a bit old

the kite option seems to be reasonable in that it allows me a more classic motor yacht design if I can build the system myself
kites are readily available as used tandem parasails and after that its rope a winch and control lines and some practice "sailing" the thing



I think it would be kinda cool to sit at the helm and fly the kite instead of just motoring constantly

I've tried those stunt kites and there just not that hard to fly

if I could pull it off I could have all the livability of a power yacht with the fuel economy of a motor sailor

 

Your problem as I understand it Boston, is because of your skills you can achieve huge savings on both the motor and the sail option, which is causing you heartache making a decision. Then there's your ability to build your own boat, with even more savings. I am trying desperately to feel sympathetic but ...

 

sorry to disappoint you but that about sums it up
I can pretty much build whatever I want
I have a complete wood shop a pretty well stocked sheet metal shop a machine shop available to me and I have access to materials dirt cheap
in metals, wood and glass
rope and cloth is about the only thing I dont typically play with
even cutting and polishing complex glass shapes is well within my realm of expertise

my latest creation although certainly not my most difficult







this is the one that taxed my abilities the most





I made all the cladding in the sheet metal shop
build all the windows from scratch
glued up every stick of wood and then milled it out
measured cut and laid up the glass in the glass shop I was working in at the time
even did the foundation and the brick work as well as set seal the glass and then did all the interior work

I am just chomping at the bit to get cracking on the boat
thing is I need to move closer to the water to do that and I am just not financially prepared to do that

I'll need to have purchased at least all the wood and all the epoxy plus have my design done and checked by an NA
so I have a ways to go and so far this year
Im still in reverse and making no progress whatsoever
although my back is starting to feel a lot better these last few days

oh well
Ill do it eventually but its a pain in the *** waiting for say $25,000 to rear its ugly head

 

10,000 miles a year....on the BC Coast/ Alaska????
RU planning to run down,once a month,to Seattle/Vancouver?
Doing offshore fishing full time???

You'll never ever never put 10k miles a year gunkholing the coast.
Never.
You'll find a nice spot-and hang out for a week,or two,or six.

FYI,from memory so kinda close:
-Vancouver to Prince Rupert a touch over 500 miles
-PR to Ketchikan about 100
-Ketch to Juneau is 280 or so.
-circumnavigate Vancouver island is over 500.

I know about cheap sails and such...if we're gonna talk about cheap used sails,home made masts,cheap rigging,etc etc well then lets compare it to good used engines.

I've seen it many times: what my friends/acquaintances spend on on new rigging,mast etc will keep me in fuel for decades.
I know a moderately disabled guy,needed electric boom for his 45' sailboat $15k and $13k for the electric furler.
Just the units-install extra.
Like u said before: use your old Cornbinder 6.9,or like I said get a rebuilt Cummins for cheap.

I've been in acouple old Stanleys,and old steam engines...very cool.

Steam turbine?
I saw one for a waste heat use,to hook to a gen set.
But you could.....?
I'll see if i can find it.


BTW very nice Victorian glass house,and deck-v. nice.

CCU yeah thats right,it was on Vargas

 

steam turbines eat steam and you need a huge number of boilers
better to have one small high pressure engine and several small efficient boilers to run it. Wood pellets are cheap easy and clean but the fire box is a trick to get running at peek efficiency. you need to balance feed speed and blower speed with on demand needs. If you dont get it right the efficiency drops like a rock and your wasting fuel.

its duable but I just want to build the hull and get on the water with the diesel I have

I can fine tune things like the kite system and the steam power later as long as Ive built with them in mind

aaarrrggg
with my back the way it is I cant even stand at my drafting table lately
driving me nuts to just be working on sketches

oh well
I have this gigantic bottle of Gekkeeikan to get me through

 

I guess one could argue that motors are cheaper since most ship-owners went to them in the late 19th century and who knows better than an entrepreneur on how much the various costs are...in that case though...I suppose some of the savings came in the way of smaller crews...but by the late 19th century there were already many large sailing ships running around with skeleton-small crews and a steam engine auxiliary to run the winches and windlass. Time was money...and profits dependent more on speed.In the case of pleasure boaters this is not so much a factor. Also, the safety afforded by greater steam engine speeds was also perhaps a factor....insurance costs lower? Still...the fact that sailing ships were discarded by and large by the early 20 th century says something for the motor argument...or a sad but fitting ending to the previous Romantic Century.

 

@Tad, looking over my older post about your location, I see I was probably less polite than I should have been. Sorry about that.

What I should have said, more tactfully*, is that conditions on the southern end of the inside passage and the northern end vary considerably. It is probably wise to prepare for the less hospitable northern end, rather than the southern end.

*I'm an engineer, tact is not something I excel at.

@Boston, Tad is most likely correct that the cheapest way to get here is a used sailboat with an inboard diesel. Assume that the diesel will be running 90% of the time under way, but it's a small engine, compared to that in a powerboat, and you will likely come out ahead money-wise.

 

while Im always open to new considerations ( for instance a spectacular design I had not previously considered ) so far the idea of power in this area seems easier and cheaper at least for me.
(and yes I have waffled several times)

this is a copy of a letter from Dashew to WillAllison that I copied from another thread

now granted Im not in an 83' multimillion dollar yacht but still its an interesting comparison

Im just going to be living rough and powered by a good old cheap international diesel I could probably replace used for $500 when I need to
I can drop it in myself

hell I bought this truck for a shot of whiskey I could probably find another dead one and bring it back to life before I go
never hurts to have a spare

as I said its the peripheral crap on the motor that is generally more trouble than the motor itself
at least thats my experience but then again Im a gear head and I kinda keep and eye on what a motor is acting like and tend to catch issues early before I blow anything up

 

Boston

Those are some real nice looking building projects you've done.

Me being with a somewhat similar background of many skills(for my age at least), I have a nasty habit of merging different techniques. I studied this technique for a use as an auxiliary power unit for my farm and woodshop heating and electricity.

Have you read about wood gasification? It's a very old technique thats being studied again and with current materials looks way better than the CO bins (finnish term badly translated) of the past days. It has some drawbacks of course: main ones being heat, temperatures inside the reactor should rise to around 800 decrees celsius, and the explosive reaction gas (mainly hydrogen for a good reactor) near atmospheric pressure.

In your setup the gas would be powering maybe a big block V8. The difficulties of gasification in automotive use has been the varying loads, but in a boat the system could be well optimised because of the steady load. The fuel could be basically any biomass, but wood is the easiest. In modern gasifiers I've seen the fuel was basically green, older gasifiers needed dry wood. The limitation to my understanding would be, that the fuel be dry enough to not start warming in storage.

This is just an alternative to the steam system you've been thinking. The diesel setup is probably the way I'd go in your situation.

Them links
Wikipedia
FAO study on gasification

 

Im just going to be living rough and powered by a good old cheap international diesel I could probably replace used for $500 when I need to
I can drop it in myself

The International DT 466 and DT 360 are really fine for conversion to marine use.

The bell housing is SAE and a Twin Disc is a snap to install.

Since you are in cold weather the keel cooling and dry stack will probably be only choice.

If a custom blanket is purchased for the exhaust , no water cooled manifold need be bought.

Best of all 3 thoughts

These are class 5 truck engines , so if a new truck is wrecked it is simply discarded so almost NEW for engine no money is EZ

The Intl. folks sell rebuild kits a couple of times a year for $700, sleives pistons bearings and gaskets.

These same engines have been made for decades so if you prefer a non electric computer injection , there easy to find.

Turbo , non turbo , your choice.

FF

 

way to go Fred you know that motor well. I was thinking dry stack and no jacket, cheap cheap cheap. I liked the heated rail idea a lot and it will make up for a world of heat retention sins. that and I will keep the radiator, so the total coolant volume is going to be a lot higher.

with only about 80,000 on it its just about broken in and ready to do some work. You are right I can buy that engine all day long out of old or even not so old used trucks for a song. Its the perfect cheapo engine that is just exactly in the power range for the build. That and there is millions of them out there ready to go.

all I need is a break and I can get these plans finished and checked. After that Im just dying to get started. Soon as I can I'll post more of the plans and start getting some input

One of my concerns with the design I have vs the area I want to travel is visibility. The commuter design was never intended for waters with lots of trash in it. at least not logs and icebergs. I notice on a lot of the commercial boats in the area there are high and forward pilot houses. My bet is its to aid in avoiding these kind of things in the water. For as much as I hate to start over I may want to correct this visibility issue somehow, if floating obstacles are really as prevalent as suggested.

 

Without a doubt it was the speed of steam more than anything else that conquered sail, especially in some trade items like tea where first to an impatiently waiting market was king. Problem with early steam was the need for a black crew to shovel coal, or accepting a limited range burning wood. So sail survived for a while on the long routes. Burning oil solved both those, and the advent of the IC engine with its greater efficiency put the last nail in sail's coffin.

I'm not so sure about the safety aspects of steam: compared to sail maybe but steam engines and their boilers can be touchy!