An interesting comparison is Steve Dashew's "Wind Horse" the un-sailboat. Steve and Linda have almost 10,000 miles on the boat on the trip from New Zealand to California. See: http://setsail.com/dashew/do_PARADIGM.html The boat is 83' LOA, 81'LWL Beam deck 17.8', Draft 5' Displacement 100,250 lbs. Twin John Deere 4045TFM, M1 rated at 105 hp, One typical leg of the voyage, the boat used 0.738 us gallons per nautical mile at 10.4 knots average speed. Another leg also gave 10.4 knot average, with 7.27 gal an hour--including stabalizers and airconditioning (off alternators on the mains to inverters). Much of the voyage was into the wind and waves, plus adverse current of about 1/2 knot. This is an example of long, narrow and relitatively light giving excellent effeciency of about 1.4 miles a gallon. There are a number of hours of interesting reading on the web site. Despite Steve being my friend, I'll have to say that this boat looks more like a destroyer than a yacht...Personal feeling that low HP is fine if the hull is effecient. Bob Austin

At 06:48 PM 11/17/2005 -0600, you wrote: >adverse current of about 1/2 knot. This is an example of long, narrow and >relitatively light giving excellent effeciency of about 1.4 miles a gallon. Running the numbers a few other ways. 7 gals an hour works out to about 105 horsepower. I did not go around and study the power curves for the JD engine but that's roughly 50% load with 2 engines of that horsepower. The theoretical max speed of the "unsailboat" having a water line length of 81, which it is not, gets a square root of about 8.5 to 9 (at the most), using the 8.5 number. 1.0 x = 8.5 knots 1.1 = 9.35 1.2 = 10.2 1.3 = 11.05 1.35 = 11.4 All approx. If the WLL is closer to 81, then the numbers are about 1/4 to about 3/4 knot higher. The top speed is about 11.4 to 12.0 depending on the actual water line length. 105 hp in reserve is not a lot of power to push a 100k pound boat around in a storm. But, of course with this kind of speed, avoiding storms is much more feasible. This kind of engine loading seems pretty close to ideal. Without having more information it is difficult to be sure, but I would guess that fuel consumption could be cut in half by slowing to about 1.0 maybe 1.1 of the square root of the WLL. In other words, over 9 knots on just over 3 gals an hour. Even this design ought to benefit by the slower speed. There are a lot of tradeoffs available in such a design. After all, this sort of strategy has been experimented with for almost 100 years. Mike Capt. Mike Maurice Tualatin(Portland), Oregon