"I am a mellow sailor. I need a crew to make me a sandwich and bring me a beer, not to make minor adjustments and get all jazzed because we are going 5.8 KPH instead of 5.6." Ditto, Jeff. --Craig ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Grudin" <grudin@vdbs.com> To: <montgomery_boats@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 12:15 PM Subject: My new Motor (Jokingly) Wow! Are you sure you guys are sailors? Sailboats are slow, mellow things that gracefully fly on the wind. With beer in hand, I stand at the tiller, my now gray hair whipping back and forth in the breeze. I know. I have a friend who is a sailboat racer, actually a tactician. He measures every little thing and carefully calculates his tactics to eek out another few tenths of a KPH. I hate sailing with him. I am a mellow sailor. I need a crew to make me a sandwich and bring me a beer, not to make minor adjustments and get all jazzed because we are going 5.8 KPH instead of 5.6. My friends tell me they know the sailing was good if they see me coming back to the dock with the tiller between my legs and they can hear me playing some hornpipes on my whistle. To be honest and accurate, I didn't have a wind meter to accurately measure the wind speed. I was guessing, perhaps a bit low, at the 12KPH. The water was choppy with some white horses spraying off the tops of the chop, but not steadily. It was very puffy. With the sails full, we were probably averaging about 18.754 degrees of heel with about 29.578 degrees as we came up in the puffs. I usually gauge it as time to reef when my dog goes down into the cabin, and stays on the floor. I have to admit that we had previously run through some low water and picked up a bunch of green stuff on my rudder, I am sure there was some on my keel as well increasing the drag a bit. Maybe we were heeling a bit more than normal. At 30 KPH, which is not uncommon in our area, I usually have the main double reefed and have no jib up. The boat screams along and seems to handle very well in these conditions. Dick, How does one move the draft forward? Howard, Nissan makes a 9.9 and a 9.8. Pretty weird, but the 9.8 is the lighter one. A smaller motor probably would be fine in most situations. Since I couldn't try one out, I didn't want to make an error on the wrong side. We have very strong currents in the Delta and heavy winds. There have been times when I have been healed over (I wont say to what degree) with full sails and heavy apparent wind only to find I was moving backward over ground. Bones, The motor weighs 81 pounds. I guess the newer motors are heavier than the old. The new Honda 9.9 weighs about 95 pounds or something like that. Spring is here. It is time to sail! _____ 73 de AC6KW <mailto:jeff@grudin.net> Jeff Grudin, DVM Web Add: http://www.grudin.net