Fuel

Diesel fuel powers Seeker's main engine and generator. It is stored in several tanks and moved through filters, polishing equipment, manifolds, and a day tank before reaching the engines.

Comments

How fast can Seeker sail?

Her hull speed is determined by her length at the waterline and that number is about 11 knots. We have touched 13.5 knots, but that was a lot of wind pushing us south around Cape Hatteras. In down wind conditions with 15 knots off the stern quarter, or coming from behind but not directly behind we will do 6.5 to 7 knots with all three sails up. With the wind on the beam, directly from the side we do about 4.5 knots in 15 knots of wind. And we will heal to about 12 degrees. Sea stats or how big the waves are will change these number as well as how much cargo and fuel we are carrying. And tell you the truth, I'm guess a bit at the numbers. I never built Seeker as a go fast boat. She is big, heavy, strong and slow. I always wonder why people who want to get somewhere fast choose sailing when we have airliners.

Talk to Doug

I just passed the 1/3 mark on this thread, and man what a ride. I feel like I'm too deep into a bender where I just wanna go home and sleep it off but FOMO keeps me consuming... it's like some fucked up intellectual take on La Grande Bouffe. I wanted to read it all before posting too much but I'm actually getting queasy, so I'll take a breather to comment on how fundamentally fucked the drive system is on this ship of follies. First off, casting your own propeller blades is just plain stupid. Blade profile is the one place where driveline design strays from the realm of straightforward engineering and into the dark arts. This is possibly the very worst place to rely on intuition, where all manner of diligent engineering practices and CFD won't get you anywhere near the very expensive experience gained by the industry. Now about that bus transmission... using an automatic transmission? For the stated purpose of increased fuel economy?? In front of a CPP??? I'm at a loss for words... The idea to introduce a transfer case into this sorry mess is where it gets really wild. On some level he must understand that what he needs isn't more ratio... right? And certainly not a compounding five two to one. Phew. It is actually impressive to fuck something up so comprehensively. Most comparable attempts never make it off the blocks.

Fundamentally fucked? That's a pretty low bar for a prediction. Everything on Seeker has been fundamentally fucked according to Sailing Anarchy at one time or another.

Casting our own propeller blades wasn't stupid. It was fun. We learned how to cast some big-ass bronze blades, and they have pushed a 70-ton boat a hell of a lot farther than the people predicting their failure ever expected.

Is the drivetrain perfect? Hell no. The reduction is too low. That's why we're changing it. The Hundested variable pitch propeller works. The Cummins works. The AT545 works. The prop works. And now we're adding the NP205 transfer case to get the reduction closer to where we want it.

That's the difference between building something and being a loser sitting behind a keyboard explaining why somebody else shouldn't have built it. You build it. Try it. Break shit. Learn something. Fix it. Then go try it again.

If the objective had been to design the perfect drivetrain on paper before leaving the dock, Seeker would probably still be sitting in the front yard. Instead, we're out here using the damn thing.

Seeker Fundamentally Rocks!

Sailing Anarchy

Fuel

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