Soup on Wednesdays - Food for Thought: Motorsailing

Sometimes, I find myself pondering at the intersection of two seemly unrelated pieces of information.

1. I've recently finished reading Peter Pye's Omnibus (the collection of his four cruising books - one of which is not published in any other place). In his second book, The Sea is for Sailing (1957), he writes about their cruise from England, through the West Indies, the Panama Canal, through the South Seas to Bora Bora before heading to Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest. They spend the winter with the Smeetons near Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. The next summer they sail north through the inside passage to the Queen Charlotte (Haida Gwaii) Islands, Ketchikan and then into Prince Rupert on their way back down to Vancouver and Victoria. It is here at Prince Rupert where the following takes place. Remember that Moonraker, the Pye's yacht, is a old (built 1896) gaff-rigged cutter, a converted fishing boat of 29 feet.

But there is something I like to remember. We were tied up to the Prince Rupert Yacht and Rowing Club. We had by this time exhausted our supply of “gas” (most of it had gone on priming) so I took our three two-gallon cans to the man who looked after the gas station. I pulled out a five-dollar bill but he firmly shook his head.
“I read in some newspaper you’d sailed from England to Victoria on twelve gallons,” he laughed, “I guess I’d like to give you this to get you home.”      
~ Pye, Peter. The Sea is for Sailing. (1957) (The Peter Pye Omnibus. 1986) 252-3.

The "twelve gallons" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does show how much the Pyes (and other voyagers of that generation) sailed rather than powered or motor-sailed.


2. On Monday, I checked a blog I follow from time to time to find this entry which I'll quote in full:

about that motor...

In Rodger Martin's recent IBEX talk about sharpies he said something that resonated for me...

"In the last couple of years while cruising in the Bahamas I’ve seen that the great majority of sloops motorsail upwind or close-reaching with only the
mainsail and downwind with only a jib set. In a month in the Bahamas a couple of years ago out of hundreds of boats I saw only two other boats sailing with both sails up and no engine running..."

Which is not to say I think that engines are a bad thing but for a lot of people they do become a crutch that seriously gets in the way of developing into better sailors.

Just something to keep in mind...

All of this makes me wonder: how much are people actually sailing? We, ourselves, were rather guilty of doing a lot of motorsailing this summer. How about you?

It also makes me wonder: when people talk about how better "modern" (what-ever that means this week) sailboats go to weather, are they talking about motorsailing or actually sailing?

Watch out for the ways that your various seemly unrelated reading might catch you in the cross roads.

Blessed Be,

Joel