I went out sailing today in Sarasota Bay, there were quite a few larger boats out, and a couple cats, but I saw no other TI's (whats up with that...),
The winds were very low (like usual), and actually fairly steady coming mostly from the south east. My original plan was to sail up to Egmont Key and back (about 40 miles rounds trip) but the winds were a little to light for that so I ended going up to Anna Maria Island and back (about 20 miles round trip). I ran aground up there (again) in shallow water (really hard to navigate that area because it shallow pretty much everywhere), I got frustrate and ended up turning around and heading back (it was downwind sailing all the way up there, so it was a little boring without my spinnaker.
Here are the wind plots for the day.
If I had to guess the average wind was around 5mph mostly from the S, Anna Maria is due north of City Island (where I launch).
I had a long distance to cover and in light winds (5 mph) downwind, (a stock TI does around 3mph in those conditions ), I passed about a dozen cruiser boats with massive sails, most looked to be going around 4-5 mph, all of us sailing in the same direction.
My boat goes best either upwind or downwind in light winds, where I tack back and forth about 20 degrees off the wind upwind, and 160 degrees on downwind with the wind coming from my rear quarter. When sailing at 180 degrees downwind I can't get my wing sail to take its assymetric shape, I have to have something from the side that I can re-direct in order to create my own apparent wind.
Normal operation on my boat is I typically start the engines when I go out, lock the throttle at about 1/4 throttle, with my high pitch props, this propels the boat (with no sails) to about 5-6 mph. I then start sailing and do my best to maximize the efficiency of the sails, and pedal the mirage at a steady pace (about 40-50 cycles per minute), this normally gets me to an average cruising speed of around 8 mph with a few jumps to 10-11 mph once in a while. Sailing this way I consistently get between 80 and 100 mpg with my motors, and about 2 1/2 to 3 hrs of run time per 1 liter tank ( I literally do this pretty much every weekend for my exercise program.).
This week since I had more distance to cover than normal, and the winds were pretty steady and the water was pretty flat, I thought I would increase the throttles on the engines and see if I could average 10 mph (that's just two more mph than normal).
Well I was able to maintain about 10mph (in 5 mph winds) downwind (2x windspeed), but at what price. I measured how much fuel I used total when I got home, and I used 1 whole gallon of fuel just to travel 20 miles, that comes out to 20 mpg (the absolute worst fuel economy I have ever had). I suspect the majority of that fuel was used on the downwind leg since on the way back it was almost directly upwind (the best point of sail on my boat is about 15-20 degrees off the wind (really close hauled)) so I cut the motors back to 1/4 throttle all the way back and was able to maintain my normal 8-9 mph all the way back with a couple 10-11 mph jumps.
Lessens learned:
When you have a hybrid powered boat resist the temptation to try to go faster than the design intent, I used five times the normal amount of gas to try and average just 2 mph faster average speed. This reminds me of a Honda CVCC car that I had once that had advertised fuel economy of 50 mpg (this was a long time ago). I used the car to drive back and forth to work (about 120 miles round trip) every day. In order to get the advertised fuel economy I think the car was designed to slow down to around 30 mph going up hills, then just get over the hill (barely), and I suspect you weren't supposed to do more than about 45 mph max, (actually with the pedal floored I could get up to about 60 mph on level ground, even faster downhill LOL) well apparently I don't drive the way they intended and would have the accelerator on the floor all the way to work and back and only got around 15 to 20 mpg all the time I owned the car (so I sold it and bought a Porsche instead).
Now I know I have to finish my main wing sail.
It was an interesting day to say the least, and I got my exercise in for this weekend (actually pedaled over 30 miles this weekend in total)
Bob