Do you have to tow a fuel barge? How bad is it at 3o Knts?
I have a gasser but single engine, the newly designed Mer 6.2 L 350 hp with a Bravo two leg. If I were to go 30 knots and stay there for an hour (this is hard on the engine, so I would go for 30 minutes, then slow down to roughly 22 knots). I would be burning close to $150 hour with gas, note diesel is cheaper. And also note, if you are purchasing fuel up here with American dollars you are getting at least a 20 % discount.
But once the hour was up at 30 knots, then 22 knots, I would be cruising at roughly 7 knots as I would have made it close to the beginning of Desolation Sound. Savary Island is 24 miles away from Comox. And then repeat this for the trip home. I often will do 14 knots as well. I don't mind going slow when surrounded by amazing scenery.
For you it is kind of the same, you have hops from Seattle and those hops get repeated a lot. I don't know if you follow MV Freedom vlog but they are out of Seattle and live full time on their Nordhavn 43 (?). They frequently go to the Hood Canal. Before their Nordhavn they had a substantial Sea Ray and I know they brought it up to the Desolation Sound area which must have been expensive.
Here is a 2016 video of MV Freedom (both boats they have owned have the same name), this one on their Sea Ray.
Toba Inlet is in the northern section of Desolation Sound and generally is ignored by the cruising hoards, its also one of the prettiest as the ocean is glacier fed and can take on that neat turquoise colour you can see in lakes in the Canadian and American Rockies:
They might be a good couple for you to follow, they do a lot of cruising, off season cruising and don't just sit and live at the marina. You can get a lot of cruising ideas from them. Here is one vid in their Norhavn:
So their Nordhavn is trawler like (owners will quickly point out they are not trawlers but 'Passage Makers) and 7/8 knots is their typical cruising speed.
I have edited this in, speed comes at a price and of course I'd love to be paying what diesel trawlers usually pay for a particular cruise. But speed does something else as well, for me both a negative and a positive.
On the negative side, it makes a cruising area smaller. When you set out in a sailboat and head over to the gulf islands through Poirier Pass in the gulf islands from the Royal Vancouver yacht club, its a "big trip." You just assume you will be on the water into the gulf islands from Vancouver for 4 to 6 hours. On a faster boat, this same cruise might take an hour and a half. The speed allows you to take in more territory in the same amount of time a trawler would take three times longer.
So for example, I wanted to burn off some old gas so a buddy and I went out on my boat in November from Comox past Savary Island, through the Copeland Islands, past Lund, past Alice point, headed up the west side of West Redonda, across the top, down through the Waddington channel, back home again through the Copeland Islands, past Savary and on to Comox. The entire trip took roughly 5 hours and a bit. As I told my buddy that same trip on a trawler would have taken 15 hours of cruising and a sailboat even longer. So speed shrinks what seems like a large area to smaller geography.
But on the positive side, if I have a 4 night trip I can leave Comox and be in the Broughtons in 6 hours, muck around for a three nights then head home. This would not be possible in a trawler or sailboat in 4 nights, or it could if you were cruising almost continuously.
I will say once you have speed, you don't want to go back to slow cruising only.
too big for me!
