Power or Sail

[girdasso]

In my opinion, the "1/3 rule" is nonsense. I have cruised and raced in the Med for many years from Majorca in the west to Kusadasi in the east including Sardinia, the Amalfi coast, Croatia, and the Aegean and have rarely had to motor for lack of wind. The boats we sailed however were proper sailing boats - not heavy klunkers.

[5BTM]

Power for cruising the canals.

[KWF]

Originally Posted by Open-d

I have been considering cruising the Med or similar venue. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and have "learned" that in a sailboat you can expect to sail 1/3 or the time, power 1/3 or the time and sail under power 1/3 of the time.
Being becalmed appears to be a perennial problem.

If those figures are roughly accurate, it seems you would be better off, or nearly so, on a power boat such as a Hatteras LRC.

Is there a consensus on the desirability of an LRC or similar vessel, vs a single or mono-hull sailboat?

Depends in part on your cruising style. If you have a rigid plan, that is want to get to a specific harbor on a given day and require a certain host speed to do that yoy will motor slot of the time. If you are happy going as fast, or slow, as the wind will take you and find a place to dock, moor, or anchor based on that you’ll be sailing most of 5he time.

[Johan Leopard51]

Few people mention location or where the vessel will be most often used in what weather.

Unfortunately we can’t live aboard yet. So our time is holiday time and that is weather selected and that in Seychelles where ours is, is low wind. There are hundreds of sail charter vessels and I figure we see them under sail maybe 5% of the time.

imho most sail catamarans (vast majority there) are terrible at make way under power. We have 51 power cat and on the exact same trip same time, a 60 foot “sailing” cat returned 50% more fuel than the power cat (at about 7 knots average).

Summary : imho in low wind environments, sailing cats have too small motors.