Paul,
you said:
The downsides of an outboard as I gather from your collective responses are:
1) cavitation in waves which means not sufficient oomph in a seaway if you have
to get anywhere under engine.
2) not pretty
3) not in the original design
4) not cheap (just less expensive than the alternative)
5) can be annoying hanging over the transom raising/lowering the transom
mounting bracket
6) might not supply enough electricity to run house lights/VHF/GPS etc. needs
(true? would this be an issue?)
1. this may not affect you (you say you motor in calm waters), but it is an
issue, even in moderate swells
2. secondary
3. ditto; though you will need to reinforce the transom
4. may not be true, especially, if you can resuscitate your original A4. Some
suggestions about the modifications are pretty interesting (and should address
most of your problems)
5. this is more than annoyance. Not knowing your age and physical ability, it
is hard to say how big an issue it is, but lowering and raising the outboard
motor is not a trivial thing to do, especially, if the boat is moving in the
waves. Btw. this was one of the primary reasons why we upgraded to a bigger
boat with an inboard.
6. almost certainly. Most outboards have big enough alternator to supply power
just to run it; there is very little spare left. A bigger alternator would
require a bigger engine and suddenly p.5 becomes a big issue. You would have to
consider solar (or wind) even just to keep up with your electronics on board (I
am not even talking about recharging batteries after a night on the hook).
Your answer to p.1 indicates that you have issues with no wind, where you want
to motor. My experience is that it makes a tremendous difference if you have an
inboard vs. outboard. To me and my wife, the sound of the outboard was annoying
enough that we never (really) motored other than out and into the harbour. If
we were moving even at 1 kt. the engine was silent (if there was less wind, we
would not go out or if we expected wind to die down, we would shorten our day).
With the inboard, we have already motored for almost 1 h without any (lasting)
effects on our sanity.
In your emails, I hear some of the sentiments I had before we changed boats.
Our outboard became somewhat unreliable (I think that I eventually traced this
down to fuel filters and fuel itself) and it was a really bad feeling – every
time we needed to start the motor I could never say if it would start and how
long it would last. It takes away from the pleasure of sailing.
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