Will Sailboats Still Be Made in 30 Years?

[StuM]

Originally Posted by Paul Elliott

If you gave me a free electric boat that used unobtanium batteries and 9000% efficient solar panels and a silent motor and was completely usable for long-distance voyaging I would still want to have a sailboat. It's not always about practicality! I would probably enjoy buzzing around on the impossi-boat, but there's just something magic about sailing.

Hear, hear!

[Zven]

Originally Posted by Sailorbob8599

... after all, the wind is free ..... no government has ever tried to 'TAX' that source of power...

Hmm, really?
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...nap-story.html

[Sailorbob8599]

Originally Posted by hafa

Want to trade maintenance bills?

You're going to have maintenance bills whatever your mode of conveyance. My comment referred strictly to the propelling force of the wind which indeed is FREE.

[Hasbeen]

I did 53,000 nautical miles around the Pacific & Oz cruising grounds in 6 years in my 40 footer.


It was not expensive as far as the sailing gear & the boat were concerned. What was rather expensive was the ships motor, transmission & prop gear, the power generating & storage batteries, the communications gear, & the tender & outboard.


As I was mostly not using boatyards, marinas even slipping was relative inexpensive. [See my album]


I do find it rather that this business of mostly motoring from marina to marina is considered cruising.

[hafa]

Originally Posted by Sailorbob8599

You're going to have maintenance bills whatever your mode of conveyance. My comment referred strictly to the propelling force of the wind which indeed is FREE.

True, but I can't help but think that the overall maintenance for a 40ft. sailing yacht is a bit more than that for a typical motor boat. Especially here, where there are no haulout facilities.

[Sailorbob8599]

Originally Posted by Zven

Hmm, really?
Who owns the wind? We do, Wyoming says, and it's taxing those who use it - LA Times

WOW! I'm shocked to say the least. Doing a quick read-thru of the link, I gather the State got away with it causing me to be even more surprised. I knew politicians of all stripes are unscrupulous, but I would never have guessed they'd go this far . . . But then we get what we wish fro and if people do not fight it, it will happen even more often. What's to stop them from taxing you for the amount of rain on your property or sunlight for that matter. I hate to mention any more for fear it will give these thieves more ideas on how to raise taxes. SHEEEEEEESH!

[GrowleyMonster]

Yes, there are advantages to hybrid at sea. Mainly that you don't need to run the infernal combustion engine all day and night, just long enough to catch up with power consumption. And you can motor silently when needed, with the electric. Electric is instant on, no warmup, no finger crossing or praying that it will start. Instant full torque if you need it. And there is the diesel for long range, but you have the electric for low speed maneuvering with no minimum idle speed. Hybrid parallel or serial, either one, can be used to advantage.

That doesn't mean that either one can compete head to head with a cruising sailboat, though. That will probably never happen, though the technology will improve greatly over the coming years. Sail will always have an advantage. Unless there is no wind, of course.

For me, the main advantage of sail at sea is the ride. Motorboats can have a very snappy and even violent roll. A sailboat lays over and stays over, mostly, and only rolls badly when running wing and wing with a short swell on quarter or beam. Relatively speaking, anyway.

My boat is pure electric, not hybrid, and the cost of a diesel engine, and lack of room for one, will ensure that it stays that way. Eventually I hope to get a couple kw of solar panels up, which I can install a few panels at a time, as money allows, and eventually become very self sufficient and able to cruise indefinitely, albeit at a rather slow speed. It's what I like. I like sailing for a lot of reasons. I like electric motoring for a lot of reasons. apples vs oranges. I kinda like the apples best but I can't really say apples are better, just that I favor them at the present time.

There is a lot of engineering in operating and maintaining an electric propulsion system, especially a DIY setup like mine. Sailing is less technically demanding, trust me on that. The average sailboat guy will not get the best performance out of even a turnkey system and will be utterly lost in the rare event of a major equipment failure. Most sailboat guys don't even know how to manually equalize their batteries. Sail is also old school, traditional. It will never go away, even if solar and battery technology do make huge gains. Sail is sail. It will always have a lot of romance about it, and it will never be overshadowed by electric, or at least not by much. So yeah, they will always build sailboats, and backyard buildiers will always build their own, too.

Of course having both sail and electric or sail and diesel electric hybrid is the bee's knees. Power tacking, anyone? electromotorsailing? Just turning the prop over at a few dozen RPM can be advantageous, compared to having a prop just dragging in the water, and only uses maybe 40 watts. Or you can drag it, and charge the bank with regen power, if you sail pretty fast. But still, the boat is basically an auxillary sail boat.

[CatNewBee]

Originally Posted by Sailorbob8599

WOW! I'm shocked to say the least. Doing a quick read-thru of the link, I gather the State got away with it causing me to be even more surprised. I knew politicians of all stripes are unscrupulous, but I would never have guessed they'd go this far . . . But then we get what we wish fro and if people do not fight it, it will happen even more often. What's to stop them from taxing you for the amount of rain on your property or sunlight for that matter. I hate to mention any more for fear it will give these thieves more ideas on how to raise taxes. SHEEEEEEESH!

Not so surprising, as you may think. Rain is also taxed - in Germany - for the drainage of the canalization they calculate the covered Area by buildings and concrete on the property and charge you for the rain water.

Nothing is free. Even the death costs money for the grave you have to rent for 25 years ;-)

[Hasbeen]

My son recently thought about buying a navy 40Ft work boat. It's twin diesels consume 14 gallons per hour at 12 knots. He knows the boat, it's condition, & how it could be turned into a great pleasure boat.


The $21,000 in fuel it would cost to bring it the 3000 miles to here is the game breaker

[GrowleyMonster]

Originally Posted by Hasbeen

My son recently thought about buying a navy 40Ft work boat. It's twin diesels consume 14 gallons per hour at 12 knots. He knows the boat, it's condition, & how it could be turned into a great pleasure boat.


The $21,000 in fuel it would cost to bring it the 3000 miles to here is the game breaker

If he ran at 4kt he would probably use about 3gph. Just a guess. Or he could rig a couple of spritsails on a pair of jury masts, and sail it at who knows, maybe 3kt? Depending on where it is at and where it needs to go, maybe prevailing wind and current would help. (or hurt.)

[Polux]

Sure there will be sailboats and cruising sailboats but the market will be much smaller.

Many that cruise are really not in the sailing thing (otherwise we will not see so many sailboats motoring even in good conditions the) and if they offer them am inexpensive and ecological simpler alternative regarding power they will take it.

And that is a good thing because then we will see cruising sailboats going towards sail performance and sail pleasure, because the ones that still want sail cruising boats will want them to be excellent sailboats.

So, in 30 years we will have spectacularly new good cruising sailboats less in number, but much better.

But of course, this regards the new market and since as most don't have the means for a new boat we will see many of today's and tomorrow cruising sailboats still sailing.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Zven

I think it is unwise to assume that a boat's solar panels will never cover more than the same boat's horizontal area...
Flexible and bendable panels are already popular, and prices are coming down while efficiency is improving.

Of course, if the panels are not pointed at the sun, they don't collect much power. You can wrap the keel in panels too but it won't increase the overall output much. There is a reason you see household panels tilted and facing south. Much harder on a boat and not cost effective if 3 times the panels produce 10% more power.

In calm weather, solar panels could potentially be folded out to capture a great deal more of the sunshine. Sails could be made from them or combined with them.

Again, sails only occasionally face directly at the sun plus the durability would be a problem flogging in the wind.

As for rube goldberg folding devices, they really don't solve the problem.
There is enough room to handle moderate house loads (air/con is a reach but possible if you don't care about the economics). The problem is you need power when under way and there finding perfectly calm conditions gets much harder.

Satellites and other spacecraft already do some of these things.There's this little thing called wind, that they don't have to deal with. Also they are willing to spend millions to shave a pound off or squeeze it down half an inch to fit in the capsule.

Solar-powered aircraft have been built and flown - based on designs quite different from traditional planes.and are not viable for any practical use. Very similar to the experimental solar powered boats that are already out there.

I'd not be surprised to see boat design moving in this direction, in the decades to come.

I can see reaching a point where generators get replaced. It's already happening on boats with lower house power demands but propulsion demand is simply orders of magnitude greater.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by senormechanico

Like this?


https://www.treehugger.com/renewable...-the-wind.html

There was a video if you dig around on the link. The open water portion was grainy and from a long distance away, so you really couldn't tell anything. Most of the video was docking and at one point, you could clearly see water coming out of the exhaust, so it does prove you can dock a windmill powered boat on a calm day using the diesel engines.

[GrowleyMonster]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

There was a video if you dig around on the link. The open water portion was grainy and from a long distance away, so you really couldn't tell anything. Most of the video was docking and at one point, you could clearly see water coming out of the exhaust, so it does prove you can dock a windmill powered boat on a calm day using the diesel engines.

That's at least a 2kw wind turbine, plenty of power to run an air conditioner, which was probably where the water was coming from.

[jtsailjt]

Originally Posted by GrowleyMonster

That's at least a 2kw wind turbine, plenty of power to run an air conditioner, which was probably where the water was coming from.

Yesterday I was walking along the street in Honolulu (enroute to Arnolds Beach Bar, highly recommended, BTW)and a young man fell in to walking beside me (why me?) and started talking about how he just "got" technology and was going to put it all together in his head and come up with the next great technological advance. When I asked about specifics, it turned out that he really didn't have ANY technical knowledge. I didn't smell alcohol but am quite sure he was under the influence of some other drug. But in his mind, without going to the trouble of learning ANY physics or chemistry or even how computers work or are programmed, he was SURE that HE "got" technology and he wanted to tell people about that. He was an extreme case but there seem to be lots of people with strong opinions about what science/technology is apt to do next or SHOULD be able to do today, and these people have almost NO knowledge of the basics of technology so can be persuaded of almost anything by people with less than honest agendas. Unfortunately, there always have and always will be plenty of folks out there who want to line up to purchase your well marketed perpetual motion machine or who will expouse strong opinions on science that they have NO real understanding of even the basics!