Thinking About Better Offshore Motorboats

January 22, 2021December 13, 2016 by John Harries

Phyllis hanging out with Steve and Linda Dashew on "Wind Horse" arguably the first sailor's motorboat of recent times. — Phyllis hanging out with Steve and Linda Dashew on "Wind Horse" the first "sailor's motorboat" of recent times.

Now that I have set the Adventure 40 free, I have some more mind share to think about other things. And one of those other things is making offshore motorboats better.

I started writing about this three years ago and to really understand the sailor's motorboat concept you will need to read the original post, but here's the short version.

A motorboat that is:

Able to cruise offshore at 8 knots or better with a top cruise speed of 10 knots.
Fuel efficient at that speed—two to four times better than trawlers currently available.
As safe offshore as a well-found sailboat.

A quick look at the trawlers available when I wrote the original post made it pretty clear that such a boat did not exist.

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Next: Get-Home Backup for Offshore Motorboats—Part 1, Is It Even a Thing?

Previous: Motorboating and Sailing Compared—Part 2

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John was born and brought up in Bermuda and started sailing as a child, racing locally and offshore before turning to cruising. He has sailed over 100,000 miles, most of it on his McCurdy & Rhodes 56, Morgan's Cloud, including eight ocean races to Bermuda, culminating in winning his class twice in the Newport Bermuda Race. He has skippered a series of voyages in the North Atlantic, the majority of which have been to the high latitudes. John has been helping others go voyaging by sharing his experience for twenty years, first in yachting magazines and, for the last 12 years, as co-editor/publisher of AAC.