How to use your EV...

[Jamie]

Try to find a rabbit. Stay close enough to see if they get nabbed, but far enough to avoid getting caught. Harder than it seems.

Agreed!

But, if you're trying to really make a fast passage, I've find that I end up being the rabbit.

The best I've ever heard from the Nevada Police was: "We generally don't give a damn if you kill yourself in the middle of the desert. Just don't kill anyone else! But, if you drive like this near a city we will throw your ass in jail and you'll need a lawyer to get out. We have certain speeds limits within cities which require MANDITORY jail time, just like you do in California. So, slow down damnit!"

Once I got that lecture, and the associated ticket, I set way points along the route so that my phone would remind me 2 miles before each town. I didn't learn to navigate for nuthun!

That's what makes it hard. They either get away from you or you end up the prey. I run a radar detector and waze. I'm surprised I made it across the US in a bit less than 4 days without a ticket.

[BeauV]

To Waze and a good solid Radar Detector!!

[Ken Heaton (Salazar)]

I used to have a Valentine 1. I lent it to a friend for a road trip and it was stolen some time ago. Is the Valentine 1 (Gen 2) still one of the better available, or are there better choices these days?

[Jamie]

I used to have a Valentine 1. I lent it to a friend for a road trip and it was stolen some time ago. Is the Valentine 1 (Gen 2) still one of the better available, or are there better choices these days?

I think the short answer is yes, unless you have some fancy homebrew tweaks for the Valentine 1

Here is more than you ever wanted to know about radar detectors.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgLr7xoTU3XgAeLrEYp51sw

[avramd]

That's what makes it hard. They either get away from you or you end up the prey. I run a radar detector and waze. I'm surprised I made it across the US in a bit less than 4 days without a ticket.

I stopped using radar detectors over a decade ago. I used a Valentine 1 as well, and the only thing it was better at than making sure I knew about a cop nearby using radar was making me constantly miserable and not enjoy driving at all. I had a fantastic mount setup for it in my '00 S4 (v6tt), between the rear headrests, with a remote by my knee, so that it was invisible to cops, and I could turn it off without a noticeable reach. But it still had just enough false alarms that I eventually decided I'd rather just get the ticket once every few years then have daily panic attacks over things that couldn't produce tickets.

I stopped with the really fast driving after I got rid of my '04 S4(v8). I once caught myself going 85 in a 25 that really should have been a 15, a very narrow in-town street in Newport. I didn't do it on purpose, speed was just too easy and smooth. I did get up to 165 once on an almost-abandoned highway. The car was great, magnificent even, but it was a terrifying experience b/c all I could think about was getting a cop who like to beat people up and needed a plausible excuse.

[BeauV]

Avramd,

I had a couple of extremely close calls on blind corners that got me to sell the 996 Turbo. I was going to kill myself or someone else. Besides it is actually heaps more fun to drive the Morgan fast (at 1/4 the speed) than it ever was to drive the Porsche. For me, the entertaining bit is getting the car to move at its limits, and the goofy suspension of the Morgan means that the limit is WITHIN the sight lines of most roads. With the Porsche, it was easy to go around corners at a speed that insured you'd hit a stopped car or fallen tree before you get your foot on the brakes.

I did learn to drive to my visual limit and not the limits of the car. But, I nearly killed my self learning it.

Now, if I want to go really fast, I rent a race car on a track and get it out of my system.

[avramd]

Beau,

That makes perfect sense. I am fortunate that I got it out of my system in a much safer way. I took my chipped twin-turbo S4 to a couple of Audi-club track events. Watching people obsess over their cars, with trailers full of tools, and the smell of burnt rubber and hot oil (or as I like to call it, the smell of polar ice caps melting) didn't sit well with me. I observed the amount of money these people were wasting with a casual shrug, but I observed the amount of pollution they were causing in the pursuit of an end result they weren't even measuring, and that shook me in a way I couldn't initially articulate.

Then, about three months later, my first summer living in Newport. I decided to go check out the scene of the Newport Regatta at Ft Adams. I saw about 150 dinghies of various sorts all over the lawn, with many of their owners tinkering and fretting, and an odd thought and feeling came over me. The were doing exactly the same thing as the Audi owners in the pit a few months before - and yet they were doing the exact opposite thing. They were obsessing over unverifiable self-improvement, but at nobody's expense instead of everybody's.

That was the day I swore off high-performance luxury cars. I ran out the lease on my A4, and then owned nothing but used Subarus.

Until this whole electric car situation fucked with my plan. Now I own the most expensive and powerful car I've ever owned.

*sigh* best laid plans... The good news is my change in obsession led me to meet Andy, and that led me here

Avramd,

I had a couple of extremely close calls on blind corners that got me to sell the 996 Turbo. I was going to kill myself or someone else. Besides it is actually heaps more fun to drive the Morgan fast (at 1/4 the speed) than it ever was to drive the Porsche. For me, the entertaining bit is getting the car to move at its limits, and the goofy suspension of the Morgan means that the limit is WITHIN the sight lines of most roads. With the Porsche, it was easy to go around corners at a speed that insured you'd hit a stopped car or fallen tree before you get your foot on the brakes.

I did learn to drive to my visual limit and not the limits of the car. But, I nearly killed my self learning it.

Now, if I want to go really fast, I rent a race car on a track and get it out of my system.

[BeauV]

Avramd - good story. As someone who used to vintage-race my Morgan, I can certainly attest to the solution levels. Living in an area with astoundingly clean air (no one upwind by Japan) and CA cars which are generally a fair amount cleaner than other places in the world, it is startling to smell the Morgan's mixture of burning oil and back spray of fuel out the throats of the carburetors. I rationalize continuing to drive the thing by pointing out that we've moved about 45,000 miles driven per year to electric cars.

If you REALLY want to be appalled, go to an ocean fishing tournament in FL. A friend took four of us about 50 miles offshore in his 60' "sport fishing" boat. Four 9" exhaust pipes for the two diesels and we burned up around about 200 gallons of fuel catching 6 fish. I was astounded. There were at least 30 boats in the event, all about this size and all headed out about the same distance. A rough estimate is that the fleet burned around 6,000 gallons of fuel in one afternoon catching around about 150 fish.

[avramd]

There were at least 30 boats in the event, all about this size and all headed out about the same distance. A rough estimate is that the fleet burned around 6,000 gallons of fuel in one afternoon catching around about 150 fish.

Oh man, that's brutal. I have (had?) a childhood friend that as an adult now has a 20' center console with a 250hp outboard on it. He sees us as having boating in common, and has suggested taking me out on it a few times. I don't know how to tell him "No, I don't want to do that - the last thing in the world I would ever want is for that engine to turn a single revolution on my behalf when I could also choose the opposite."

I consider running the 6hp on my trimaran a necessary evil. The goal is to minimize how much I run it. A truly successful day is when we only use it to get out of the mooring field, and we catch the mooring by sail on the way back in. I may one day get to the point where "sailing is too much trouble," but if I do, I am pretty sure I will switch to "not boating," not power-boating.

[BeauV]

I will admit we have looked at powerboats. They have a lot of space to offer and once I get really REALLY old, vs just a little bit old, I may want to think more about it. But the primary reason we choose an old schooner is that we can power at about 2 gal./hour. That's going 8 knots in calm seas. So, 4 MPG. That's terrible for a car/van, but almost exactly what my buddy gets with a RV that can sleep 4. We sleep 8.

Every time we got close to a powerboat, the fuel consumption at high speeds stopped us. So, we decided if we're going to burn fuel at the rate of a slow powerboat, might as well have a displacement sail boat.

[avramd]

I will admit we have looked at powerboats. They have a lot of space to offer and once I get really REALLY old, vs just a little bit old, I may want to think more about it. But the primary reason we choose an old schooner is that we can power at about 2 gal./hour. That's going 8 knots in calm seas. So, 4 MPG. That's terrible for a car/van, but almost exactly what my buddy gets with a RV that can sleep 4. We sleep 8.

Every time we got close to a powerboat, the fuel consumption at high speeds stopped us. So, we decided if we're going to burn fuel at the rate of a slow powerboat, might as well have a displacement sail boat.

Talk about thread drift

I have a friend that claims that lobster boats, (which I assume go by another name elsewhere), cruise comfortably at 12 knots at a very low fuel consumption rate, although he makes no claim as to what. He seemed to be implying though that it was similar to what my trimaran uses when motoring at WOT which is 6-7 knots in mild seas.

He has a dream to buy one and refinish the interior to make it a comfortable cruising boat. I don't even have a concept of how much space that would be.

[SemiSalt]

I'm not believing that anything like what I would call a lobster boat is going to go 14kts on less than a gallon an hour. I suspect the boats in question are semi-planning hulls which are fairly narrow, fairly light, and fine-lined like lobster boats of 80 years ago.

[H B]

Avram, I have a friend with a Markley 46. It is a Chesapeake Bay deadrise style boat, but has similar characteristics/proportions to a NE lobster boat, minus the really high bow. It has an in-line 6 TD Cummins engine, and an interior. These types of boats (minus the interior) are popular around here as charter fishing boats, but they aren't offshore fishing like Beau's story.

He is obsessed with numbers like a lot of us here, and keeps detailed records. He 'cruises' at about 13-14 knots, and gets 1.1 MPG. The burn rate goes up dramatically to get to the 18.x top speed...I've only ever been on the boat at top speed when we are running it for brief periods to test the latest prop pitch tweak, clean the turbo, etc.
In addition to cruising it with his family, we also use it as a tow boat/home base for the Melges 32, which we tow at about 9 knots. While we are spending a bit more on fuel to run the power boat, it is actually cheaper to tow the sailboat boat up to about 100 miles under her own keel, as compared to paying a yard to haul the boat, take it apart (time), then drag it behind the Suburban at ~10MPG and drive three times as far around all the tributaries. An additional benefit to the Markley being on site at a regatta is it can sleep 5 or 6, so it cuts down on lodging expenses. If we don't need the power boat (i.e. delivery for a one-way distance race), the Melges burns less than 1 gallon/hour at 80% throttle @ 7kts, with its 9.9HP 4-stroke.

Anyway - I know this is a thread about EVs, but until petroleum products are prohibitively expensive (when the supply runs low), we humans will probably keep burning/using it. I was pleased to read randomly somewhere on the internet that renewable energy exceeded the amount of energy produced by coal recently. Don't have any idea what the context/region/etc., - edit, here it is, wow that is the whole US! - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895 - but, I doubt other industrialized countries with even more abundant resources than the US (China/Russia) are getting more solar/wind energy than from fossil fuels. We have a nuclear power plant 10 miles up the road, but interestingly, not ONE transmission line comes our way..it all heads to the Balto/DC area. Our electricity comes from nearby coal plants, and maybe some day from some wind turbines off the coast. Our electric co-op does have a couple solar farms, but these are a few acres purposely placed along a busy highway to look good to whomever they are trying to impress.

At any rate, y'all have gotten me looking at EVs, and considering them more seriously than before, but if I got one, it would still be coal powered.

[LarryHoward]

Avram, I have a friend with a Markley 46. It is a Chesapeake Bay deadrise style boat, but has similar characteristics/proportions to a NE lobster boat, minus the really high bow. It has an in-line 6 TD Cummins engine, and an interior. These types of boats (minus the interior) are popular around here as charter fishing boats, but they aren't offshore fishing like Beau's story.

He is obsessed with numbers like a lot of us here, and keeps detailed records. He 'cruises' at about 13-14 knots, and gets 1.1 MPG. The burn rate goes up dramatically to get to the 18.x top speed...I've only ever been on the boat at top speed when we are running it for brief periods to test the latest prop pitch tweak, clean the turbo, etc.
In addition to cruising it with his family, we also use it as a tow boat/home base for the Melges 32, which we tow at about 9 knots. While we are spending a bit more on fuel to run the power boat, it is actually cheaper to tow the sailboat boat up to about 100 miles under her own keel, as compared to paying a yard to haul the boat, take it apart (time), then drag it behind the Suburban at ~10MPG and drive three times as far around all the tributaries. An additional benefit to the Markley being on site at a regatta is it can sleep 5 or 6, so it cuts down on lodging expenses. If we don't need the power boat (i.e. delivery for a one-way distance race), the Melges burns less than 1 gallon/hour at 80% throttle @ 7kts, with its 9.9HP 4-stroke.

Anyway - I know this is a thread about EVs, but until petroleum products are prohibitively expensive (when the supply runs low), we humans will probably keep burning/using it. I was pleased to read randomly somewhere on the internet that renewable energy exceeded the amount of energy produced by coal recently. Don't have any idea what the context/region/etc., - edit, here it is, wow that is the whole US! - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895 - but, I doubt other industrialized countries with even more abundant resources than the US (China/Russia) are getting more solar/wind energy than from fossil fuels. We have a nuclear power plant 10 miles up the road, but interestingly, not ONE transmission line comes our way..it all heads to the Balto/DC area. Our electricity comes from nearby coal plants, and maybe some day from some wind turbines off the coast. Our electric co-op does have a couple solar farms, but these are a few acres purposely placed along a busy highway to look good to whomever they are trying to impress.

At any rate, y'all have gotten me looking at EVs, and considering them more seriously than before, but if I got one, it would still be coal powered.

This. The general term these days is express cruiser but that includes some melted fibreglass Sea Rays and the like so I like the term Down Easter. Lynne and I are thinking that is the “next step”. 34-36’ gets you a decent sleeping cabin, a galley, head and anything from an open to a closed salon. Normally narrow on a L/B basis and powered by 1-2 diesels. The “Eastbay” and similar tend to be bigger (up to 45-48’) and heavier with top speeds approaching 30 knots. “Economical cruise” closer to 18-20. The smaller, single engine boats are more 16-18 knots WOT and a comfortable 12 knots at pretty low fuel burn.

Kim’s Whitecap is probably the best example I can think of a for a fast cruiser with comfortable accomodations and economical cruise.

Sailing my seem virtuous but non recyclable hulls and sails made from refined petroleum products might argue otherwise.

[Jamie]

Avram, I have a friend with a Markley 46. It is a Chesapeake Bay deadrise style boat, but has similar characteristics/proportions to a NE lobster boat, minus the really high bow. It has an in-line 6 TD Cummins engine, and an interior. These types of boats (minus the interior) are popular around here as charter fishing boats, but they aren't offshore fishing like Beau's story.

He is obsessed with numbers like a lot of us here, and keeps detailed records. He 'cruises' at about 13-14 knots, and gets 1.1 MPG. The burn rate goes up dramatically to get to the 18.x top speed...I've only ever been on the boat at top speed when we are running it for brief periods to test the latest prop pitch tweak, clean the turbo, etc.
In addition to cruising it with his family, we also use it as a tow boat/home base for the Melges 32, which we tow at about 9 knots. While we are spending a bit more on fuel to run the power boat, it is actually cheaper to tow the sailboat boat up to about 100 miles under her own keel, as compared to paying a yard to haul the boat, take it apart (time), then drag it behind the Suburban at ~10MPG and drive three times as far around all the tributaries. An additional benefit to the Markley being on site at a regatta is it can sleep 5 or 6, so it cuts down on lodging expenses. If we don't need the power boat (i.e. delivery for a one-way distance race), the Melges burns less than 1 gallon/hour at 80% throttle @ 7kts, with its 9.9HP 4-stroke.

Anyway - I know this is a thread about EVs, but until petroleum products are prohibitively expensive (when the supply runs low), we humans will probably keep burning/using it. I was pleased to read randomly somewhere on the internet that renewable energy exceeded the amount of energy produced by coal recently. Don't have any idea what the context/region/etc., - edit, here it is, wow that is the whole US! - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895 - but, I doubt other industrialized countries with even more abundant resources than the US (China/Russia) are getting more solar/wind energy than from fossil fuels. We have a nuclear power plant 10 miles up the road, but interestingly, not ONE transmission line comes our way..it all heads to the Balto/DC area. Our electricity comes from nearby coal plants, and maybe some day from some wind turbines off the coast. Our electric co-op does have a couple solar farms, but these are a few acres purposely placed along a busy highway to look good to whomever they are trying to impress.

At any rate, y'all have gotten me looking at EVs, and considering them more seriously than before, but if I got one, it would still be coal powered.

That's a sweet mothership.....

There was a good, if somewhat annoying, discussion on that other site why EVs aren't ready for primetime with boats for most use cases, which is no longer the case for automotive. (The usual highly variable signal-to-noise ratio)

I remember when I had my SB3/SB20 and under the chute we'd go past the displacement trawlers and commercial fishing. They looked a bit nonplussed.

[H B]

That's a sweet mothership.....

Yeah..it doesn't suck..Nice to have friends that like to spend their money on multiple toys.

edit - Jamie, it took me a couple times reading your comment to figure out what I think you are saying is that boats are not ready to be EVs yet. I agree..boats are largely recreational, so the technology demand is much lower. I had a buddy take a great Olson 29 (the fastest of the O-29/O-30 variants), and totally ruin the boat by plopping in 48v worth of batteries and an electric motor. It was barely enough power to get them to the starting line for racing, and added at least 300 lbs. to the boat, and they often had to sail or get a tow home. Granted that was a home grown application, but proves the point. Much like long haul truckers which more than ever deliver all the stuff we are buying, it is mostly still big rig diesels. I suspect the boating industry will be a lot like the automotive. A few small EV boats (I know some electric picnic boats and stuff exist already) will come to the surface (think Volts & Bolts & Leafs), but most recreational and commercial boating will remain oil burning until someone like Tesla makes EV powered recreational or commercial boats for the masses. The same issue still applies...how many BTU's or KWH's can you pack in a mobile platform. Maybe they will add some superchargers to all the major channel markers and lighthouses!?!?!!

Since I live clear on the other side of the country from all the tree hugging Californians, has anyone seen one of those Tesla 18 wheelers yet?

Here's a couple pics in Fishing Bay (or on the way). This is the last year they had the Colgate before buying the Melges 32 from the Naval Academy. I don't have a pic of the M-32 tied up next to the mother ship, but I do under tow.

Larry, Yeah...DownEast style I guess...that is kind of a hybrid between an extreme lobster boat and a true Chessie dead rise. I know this goes against Avram's thought process, but Laura and I are wandering down the same road you are. I don't think I want another sailboat for cruising..it is simply too slow to get anywhere when I can count on only 4-5 knots of VMG, and there are already entirely too many motor boats with masts on them going 7 knots everywhere..that is not my cup of tea either. A Markley might be a little out of my price range, and probably bigger than we need, but I haven't really started looking yet. I've seen a Mainship 30 or two around $50K, but that might be a little small. Getting into the two engined boats means double the maintenance too! Maybe I'll cheat and do one engine with a bow thruster!

[TheOffice]

For docking, nothing beats twin screws!

OTOH, when I was a kid my dad owned a couple Brownells. I got to meet Mr. Brownell and listened closely when he said he preferred building single screw boats because the center of gravity was lower with a single engine. We often fished on one of his 32's. It was a tremendous boat unless the swordfish pulpit and liferaft were on the bow. Then it sucked in a following sea. Our 26 was a great boat!

A former sailor has a sabre 36 fast trawler with twin diesels. Very economical at 8 knots and can do 16 if he needs to get somewhere.

[LarryHoward]

For docking, nothing beats twin screws!

OTOH, when I was a kid my dad owned a couple Brownells. I got to meet Mr. Brownell and listened closely when he said he preferred building single screw boats because the center of gravity was lower with a single engine. We often fished on one of his 32's. It was a tremendous boat unless the swordfish pulpit and liferaft were on the bow. Then it sucked in a following sea. Our 26 was a great boat!

A former sailor has a sabre 36 fast trawler with twin diesels. Very economical at 8 knots and can do 16 if he needs to get somewhere.

Somehow, the watermen seem to be able to place those singe screw dead rises just where they want them but I agree on twin screws. Almost cheating.

[SemiSalt]

Here is Phil Bolger's view on a moderate speed cruiser.

ModSpd.JPG

[BeauV]

I have spent a lot of time in boats around 20' long. In the open ocean they can be VERY irritating as they fit between almost all the waves, bridging none of them. Thus, if you have a fair bit of buoyancy, which this Bolger design certainly does, you're going to go up and over every wave. All fine and good on a lake, but around here the swells are often 7-10' and the chop is another 4-6' atop that. It makes for a LOT of vertical motion and some pretty dramatic pounding. RIBs are the worst, the narrow deep-V bows of a boat like the Bertram-30 was always preferred. Ray Hunt knew how to draw a powerboat.

[SemiSalt]

I have spent a lot of time in boats around 20' long. In the open ocean they can be VERY irritating as they fit between almost all the waves, bridging none of them. Thus, if you have a fair bit of buoyancy, which this Bolger design certainly does, you're going to go up and over every wave. All fine and good on a lake, but around here the swells are often 7-10' and the chop is another 4-6' atop that. It makes for a LOT of vertical motion and some pretty dramatic pounding. RIBs are the worst, the narrow deep-V bows of a boat like the Bertram-30 was always preferred. Ray Hunt knew how to draw a powerboat.

I think you are right that the Bolger design has neither the power nor the heft to go crashing through the wave tops. It's also pretty small for that sort of thing.

I posted it because of the recommended power plant, a 70hp OB. When I walk down our dock where the sub-22 footer are, I see mostly engines with more than twice the power. But its probably a better stand in for the high mpg lobster boat mentioned above than Bertram 28 would be.

[avramd]

I'm not believing that anything like what I would call a lobster boat is going to go 14kts on less than a gallon an hour. I suspect the boats in question are semi-planning hulls which are fairly narrow, fairly light, and fine-lined like lobster boats of 80 years ago.

Well he said 12kts, not 14kts, and although it's only an 8% difference, drag being the cube of speed, it's worth noting that 12kts is a pretty impressive claim if the fuel consumption really is trivial. As for a gallon an hour, being able to go on a cruise and count on making 12kts VMG and burn 3 gallons to go 40 miles would be a dream. If the engine was quiet and smooth anyway.

I think this all boils down to this: When it comes to being practical, I get to admit that even though my boat can sail at 14 kts in just the right conditions, the honest to god reality is that when I have a destination, at least 50% of the time I'm motoring at WOT doing 7kts or less, burning fuel at around 12 mpg.

So I get to be real about the following question: Which is more important to me, pretending that I can really cruise to any destination on less fuel than that? Or just owning the idea that sailing and cruising are two different things, and if I really want to enjoy going places on the water, this lobster boat idea is a pretty cool one. I think beau is right about the length and sea sate issue though. But the idea that with the right hull shape, you can cruise at 12 kts at 12 mpg, that is a whole different equation. Heck of a lot less complicated to plan that cruise, if the end result is that I'm probably going to burn the same amount of fuel as if I "sailed" (i.e. sailed when I could, and motored when I had to).

[BeauV]

I grew up on a boat that never went faster than 4.3k, powered at 3k, and most of the time sailed at around 3k. When I complained about it, my Dad would say: "A faster boat just makes the ocean smaller." By that he meant that he chose (as I do now) the destination based upon how much time he had. By having a faster boat, he could just go to places further away and the time remained the same. But he didn't much care where he went, he just wanted to sail. He rarely powered except in and out of harbor.

MAYAN can sail to Catalina from LA (26 miles) in about 3.5 hours. My families old boat took literally all day. But, for Dad (and now for me) the point was sailing the boat not sitting on it at anchor. If that's the goal, then it really doesn't matter how slow or fast the boat is. When we're out cruising now, we leave after breakfast and just start sailing in a general direction. After lunch we start talking about what's up ahead and where we might stop. If there isn't a place we like, we keep sailing until there is. If it's a "weekend sail", we've been sailing since after breakfast on Saturday, and it's now mid-night Saturday night we generally turn around and just go home. Sometimes we go 80 miles and sometimes we go 20.

I often go sailing by just going straight out to sea or along the coast and then home again. I'd guess it's about 1/3 of the time when I have the family aboard and about 3/4 of the time when I'm alone. For me, the goal is achieving that point of relaxation which comes when the boat and I have been sailing along for 5 or 6 hours and I'm a long way from home. By then we're across the shipping lanes and there's nothing out there to hit. On our old sloop I was gone for three days once. The Admiral made me radio in that I was ok, and we would chat for an hour or so on the SSB after dinner, but I didn't stop anywhere. I ended up about 200 miles off shore when I turned around. It was a lovely sail and some of it was done at 2-3 knots. Some of it was spent with the sails down and the anchor light on in the middle of the ocean while I got a good night's sleep. S'AGAPO would sail slowly dead downwind without any sails up. It was quite comfortable.

[Jamie]

On the trip vs destination scale of cruising, I'm very much in the trip camp. I'll happily take a cruise to nowhere - start on a Friday evening and see how far out I can get in the Gulf of Maine and still make it home for dinner on Sunday evening. I've gotten to the territorial waters of Nova Scotia (shhhh!). On the other hand, my wife likes stopping at every interesting harbor along the way, which can mean short days.

I was the boat boy on a Bertram 30 for on of my father's friends. I liked it as long as it was moving.

[BeauV]

On the trip vs destination scale of cruising, I'm very much in the trip camp. I'll happily take a cruise to nowhere - start on a Friday evening and see how far out I can get in the Gulf of Maine and still make it home for dinner on Sunday evening. I've gotten to the territorial waters of Nova Scotia (shhhh!). On the other hand, my wife likes stopping at every interesting harbor along the way, which can mean short days.

I was the boat boy on a Bertram 30 for on of my father's friends. I liked it as long as it was moving.

Jamie, the Admiral and I are seriously envious of all you folks who can get to Maine in the summertime. One of my oldest and dearest friends has his boat up there and is about to do his second summer in a row. They are the: "Sail until we want to stop, then anchor someplace" sort. In Maine it appears that there is almost always an anchorage when you get tired of sailing. Amazing. Around here the anchorages are between 20 and 50 miles apart, so we've spent a lot of nights at sea vs crawling into an anchorage at mid-night if the wind is light. Once the family got used to being at sea for dinner and the night, it has worked out well. Of course, MAYAN is not exactly hard duty for cruising. The Moore-24 is an entirely different matter. I did a 3 day race on her once - wow was I beat up.

[Jamie]

On the trip vs destination scale of cruising, I'm very much in the trip camp. I'll happily take a cruise to nowhere - start on a Friday evening and see how far out I can get in the Gulf of Maine and still make it home for dinner on Sunday evening. I've gotten to the territorial waters of Nova Scotia (shhhh!). On the other hand, my wife likes stopping at every interesting harbor along the way, which can mean short days.

I was the boat boy on a Bertram 30 for on of my father's friends. I liked it as long as it was moving.

Jamie, the Admiral and I are seriously envious of all you folks who can get to Maine in the summertime. One of my oldest and dearest friends has his boat up there and is about to do his second summer in a row. They are the: "Sail until we want to stop, then anchor someplace" sort. In Maine it appears that there is almost always an anchorage when you get tired of sailing. Amazing. Around here the anchorages are between 20 and 50 miles apart, so we've spent a lot of nights at sea vs crawling into an anchorage at mid-night if the wind is light. Once the family got used to being at sea for dinner and the night, it has worked out well. Of course, MAYAN is not exactly hard duty for cruising. The Moore-24 is an entirely different matter. I did a 3 day race on her once - wow was I beat up.

I just realized we're working on year 10. Other than a stop at the end of the St George River, we have rarely repeated a destination and we haven't even really been East of Schoodic and this last season was the first we went West of Cape Small. Some days are 5 miles, some are 40, most are about 20-25.

I've thought about moving the boat closer to me (like Florida) to get more days at sea, but it's hard to give up.

[BeauV]

Jamie, during the old SORC series of sailboat races I got to sail a lot in FL. I wouldn't bother leaving Maine. The only redeeming feature is that you can get to the Bahama, Turks, and Caicos islands. Plus the water is warm and green.

[avramd]

For me, currently the issue is that I don't get much vacation time, so if I'm going to cruise, three days is usually the limit. There are only a handful of destinations to choose from that fit into that space.

I hear you on the idea of sailing nowhere and just choosing an anchorage based on where you are when you feel like stopping. We don't have a ton of good options for that either unless I stay in the bay. If/when I retire, that will likely totally change my perspective.

[Jamie]

For us the cruise to nowhere and sailing and stopping when we want are two different things. The cruise to nowhere is designed maximize sailing over short weekends. "Nowhere", as in, "no stops", 24hr/day sailing; one tack offshore with a tack to go home whenever the timing, the wind shift the tide...etc ...is right. Some of us also have short vacation windows.