To Motor Or Not To Motor, That Is The Question

If we’re honest, passage-making often means motorsailing, says Jess Lloyd-Mostyn.

- Jess Lloyd-Mostyn

Imagine yourself on our boat. We are off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. The moon is setting. It’s five in the morning, the wind is nine knots from the northwest and we have plotted our latest position on the paper chart on the nav-table. We have travelled only seven miles closer to our destination in the last 12 hours. We know there is a little current against us and the small lighthouse to starboard hardly seems to have moved for a day.

The forecast is for light winds for the foreseeable future. We left knowing the wind would die and took this in preference to the 50-knot winds that kick up in this area between lulls. We are lucky, though, that the sea is flat. We have a choice: continue tacking up into this mild headwind for the foreseeable future – at this rate the 120 miles we have left will take us nearly nine days – or we crank up the engine and reach our destination in a day. Would you stick to your engineless ideals, or opt pragmatically for motorsailing?