Electric boats.....?

[Bigmack]

Boats have the crappiest mileage of any vehicle I know of. I have a large - 32' - boat with a small diesel engine and I get about 6 or 7 nautical miles to the gallon.

That's good for a boat that size. In fact, it's great mileage for a boat that size. I travel at about 7 knots, which is "hull speed" for my boat.

A friend bought a boat for fishing in Puget Sound.... gasoline....24 feet long... and he gets roughly 1 mile to the gallon.

That 45 foot yacht you see on the water probably gets between 1/3 to 1/2 mile to the gallon.

Question is, what is being done about electric or electric/hybrid power for boats?

I know of one manufacturer, Duffy Boats in Seattle, but their boats seem like boats for protected waters.... sunday cruising.

Anybody really up on this?

[frogcycle]

1. sails n/t

[evlbstrd]

2. Submarines.

Just put a nuclear reactor on your boat.

[ingac70]

3. ....

http://www.tamarackelectricboats.com/

[Bigmack]

8. Thanks... but I need a boat that can take ...

4 and 5 foot waves and 25 knot winds in fairly big, open reaches. Not all the time, but we've been caught out lots of times.

[lumberjack_jeff]

4. I had a sailboat.

It was 45' long, displaced 6 tons and with the sails down, I burned 1/2 gph at 5-6 kts, in other words, 10-12 nautical mpg.

Most of the inefficiency of a power boat is related to underwater hull form. Those big flat transoms gobble fuel.

I know of several sailors who have converted to electric secondary propulsion, either via batteries or via fuel cell. Check out the newsgroup rec.boats.cruising and rec.boats.building

[DCKit]

5. There's a huge repo industry for power boats right now....

Sail boats? Not so much.

[lectrobyte]

6. I'd assume if someone can afford a 32 foot boat, then fuel shouldn't

be a problem, right? After all, it's probably not like your out cruising in it every day.

[Bigmack]

7. You assume wrong...

There's 32' boats, and there are 32' boats.

My boat is no junker, but it's older and slower than what you're thinking of, maybe.

Let's put it this way. My fishing buddy just spent an amount equal to two of my boats for a 24' boat for salmon fishing.

It does, however, have 2 - 100 gallon diesel tanks. A fillup would be $1,000 .... if I were empty. And that's a lot of money, to me, anyway.

In the past, we went up the Inside Passage toward Alaska for a couple of months at a time. Not any more.

[lectrobyte]

9. Duly noted. I'm not sure hybrid or electric power is well-suited for

boats, the reason is it effective for cars is that much of the time you are speeding the vehicle up and then immediately using that energy to make a bunch of heat in your brake pads etc., and regenerative braking recovers that energy up to a point. Seems like there's not much stop and go traffic in boating like that.

Maybe look into bio-diesel?