After the ghoulish curiosity for questions about storms and pirates abates, people are always interested in our engine. And it’s often with a tone of reassurance and satisfaction, once they mentally re-label us as “sailboat – but with an engine”, that they seem far more relaxed about our family’s watery fate. It’s like the engine is somehow the trump card, the safety net, the only aquatic equivalent to the landlubber’s car, which they couldn’t possibly be without.
But, of course, we didn’t buy a sailing yacht to simply ‘drive’ everywhere and letting go of the idea that a diesel engine is your “get-out-of-jail-free” card takes some getting used to.
Sometimes the engine is the only sensible form of propulsion. Close quarters manoeuvres, in an anchorage or marina, are always done under motor power. I remember the first time that I steered a boat out through a crowded harbour and was never more grateful for a sturdy engine, nor more aware of the close proximity of so many large, expensive and protruding yachts around me.
It’s important to remember that it is, of course, possible to perform all such moves under sail, although it requires considerable skill and nifty seamanship. Most of these operations we haven’t done purely under sail since we first did our training as you get into the habit of doing everything in the easiest and sometimes laziest way you can when you live aboard. However, we do like to sail onto anchor and off again when the conditions are right – just to keep aware. You never know when your engine might fail and you may be forced to sail when you weren’t expecting to. This happened to friends of ours arriving into New Zealand after over a week at sea who found their batteries had conked out entirely and had to sail onto the quarantine dock.
Primarily we do aim to sail as much as we can and what allows us to do so is being flexible, waiting until we have the right wind and weather conditions to sail as much of every passage as possible. We don’t rush to turn the key and we’re quite happy to bob idly in the doldrums for days as there is no pressing schedule. Yet, we’re also practical about it. I am sure you would like to think that we sail everywhere and we would like to believe this ourselves. But it simply isn’t true.
The motor is a godsend. In the notoriously fluky winds of equatorial cruising or as your only line of defense against an adverse running current; or when you’re pushing to get the anchor down before sunset or simply to get an extra kick of momentum through a sloppy sea our trusty engine is a workhorse that I wouldn’t be without. Other times we use it to motor-sail closer to the wind than we could if just under sail.
Turning to the dark side and motoring is not a simple choice as though it can be a definite help it isn’t a trump card that always pays off. Our motor is only 42 horsepower and our boat is a 42-foot cruiser that requires a lot of momentum to keep her going, so under engine or motor-sailing, there will be some sea states that it just won’t be strong enough to conquer. Friends of ours in Mexico experienced this too when just 15 miles south of Acapulco their destination after three days at sea. They’d been fighting current and a head wind for most of that time when they ran out of fuel. They persisted to sail into wind, current and choppy swell but after two days and hardly a mile’s progress they swung the tiller around and they eventually reached their last port, seven days after having left it – pretty soul-destroying stuff.
However, my problem with the motor is that it costs money to run and that every hour it runs it is getting closer to that inevitable moment when it breaks down beyond my knowledge of fixing it. And then, at that point, we will find out if we can really sail! So I sometimes treat it like a shrine to the great deity of diesel engines: I buy it the best filters and oils that money can buy and I change them religiously. And we are picky about the fuel we put in, sometimes a challenge in remote parts where the quality declines. But we try to treat it kindly, in the hopes that the knight in shining Yanmar will help out each time we fire it up.
