Rideau Waterway Flotilla commentary, continued...
I’m still trying to figure out how everything works. We literally have 15 pounds of instruction manuals! But with little effort, we had the Raymarine chart-plotter showing us colorful maps of our location, and we were able to get the autopilot to synch right in with waypoints so that it would take over and magically take us there! When not in a confined space, we ran much of the way in this mode – it’s very relaxing and allows freedom from the tyranny of holding a steering wheel.
But I’ve still not been able to get our chart-plotter to give a readout of miles traveled. It has several “log” counters but they continue to read zero despite my efforts. (Apparently, it’s looking for a paddlewheel speed/log input – which none of our boats have). The result of this is that I can’t tell you just how far we traveled, but I do know the engine hours.
So far, we have added fuel only once (!) on the trip. After 30 hours, we added a total of 83.7 US gallons which figures out to a mere 2.76 gallons per hour. We're happy with that.
A word about Performance: Our speed versus engine RPM (with full fuel and water and cruising gear aboard) showed a WOT speed of 18.5 knots at 3800 RPM. (Speeds of 21.5 knots @ 3900 RPM were observed during initial sea trials by PDQ.) Our typical (fast) cruising speed has been about 16 kts @ 3200 RPM. A very quiet, economical cruise speed of 7 knots can be had at about 1500 RPM. (This would, no doubt, be the speed to extract maximum range from this boat). I hope to accumulate more information on this subject in the future which I will make it available on this site. See Performance Discussion 7/30/06 |
