Back in more idealistic days, my 27' Wylie design WILDFLOWER was without engine for the usual reasons: weight, smell, drag, cost, space, need for mechanical ability, environmental purity, blah, blah.
Reality took a starboard turn one windless night drifting in the fog off Pt. Conception with great ships' horns sounding in the vicinity. My upgrade was a war surplus 14 foot lifeboat oar. ....However, rowing a 6,000 pound sloop with one oar, while standing and facing forward, was nothing to write home about.
WILDFLOWER's oar, from the first US flagged container ship (1960) MAYAGUEZ, was retired and currently hangs above the garage. MAYAGUEZ later achieved notoriety in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, by being captured by the Cambodians in disputed territorial waters. The resulting international incident cost over 40 lives as President Gerald Ford attempted to have the ship and its crew liberated by force. Evidence later apparently showed MAYAGUEZ was steaming only 2 miles off the Cambodian coast, and not flying a flag of registry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayaguez_incident
My next attempt at motor sailing WILDFLOWER was with a WWII vintage, 3 horsepower, Seagull engine hanging off the transom. These legendary engines had achieved cult status for their ruggedness and simplicity: one cylinder, two stroke, and three moving parts.
WILDFLOWER's Seagull outboard achieved minor utilitarian status, but for a different reason. The noisy, smokey, oil hungry, little beast became, with 25 feet of chain, a second anchor.
Though WILDFLOWER sailed the first SHTP "green" with no engine, I became a believer that to do well in the SHTP necessarily requires two independent means of electrical charging. The challenge being that with just one means of charging the battery, and no backup, things can break, or not function as planned. The number of Singlehanded Tranpackers who have underestimated their charging needs is legion. It's just a fact, that despite high hopes, autopilots, coms, electronics, and electrical inefficiencies drain batteries quicker than can be replenished using modern green methods.
When crossing the Pacific, solar has always been my favorite means of charging. But solar comes with a cost. Breaking waves the first night of the SHTP can wash a solar panel right off the back of the boat. In addition, solar panels, when racing to Hawaii, are not very efficient. This is primarily because the first 50% of the race is most often under overcast skies. Then the second half of the SHTP is under 50% cloud due to passing tradewind clouds and squalls.
When sailing SW to Hawaii, the sun rises astern, passes nearly overhead, and sets off the bow. This creates an additional problem for solar: panels can be shaded by sails easily half the day, from LAN on into the late afternoon.
Back to the marine engine. Fortunate are those SHTP racers with an inboard engine. Despite all the drawbacks of a heavy chunk of hot metal in the bilge producing carbon monoxide wafting into the cockpit, a marine engine provides a semi-reliable source of energy generation. In the SHTP, an Iron Genoa not only eliminates obsessive worry about power usage, but instills confidence in taking full advantage of the electrical powered equipment being carried aboard.
And that can be a Race winner.
