Why is my Cruising Boat So Slow?

It's probably because of the junk cruising boats carry. When compared to weekend cruisers who carry enough to be comfortable, or racing boats that carry the bare essentials, long term cruising boats are overloaded.  REALLY heavily overloaded. We're carrying pretty much our worldly posessions around with us. Let's look at what Ceilydh carries, when compared to a typical short term cruising boat.

• 3 scuba tanks, BCs, regs, and weights
• scuba compressor
• big heavy RIB dinghy with a 15 HP instead of a small inflatable with a small outboard
• about 300 books for our daughter. (Yes she has an ebook too)
• 2 inflatable kayaks, 1 surfboard
• spares. Lots of spares. a case of fuel filters, watermaker filters, engine oil, outboard oil, spare outboard props, alternator, electrical black boxes for the outboard, fans, pressure water pumps, yes even a spare depthsounder and VHF, VHF antenna, GPS, shortwave radio. That reminds me I've got to pick up a starter motor for the diesel.  Yes spare parts are heavy and expensive but damm do I feel clever when I say "no worries honey, I'll just get out the spare XXX".
• 3 anchors and rodes
• extra snorkeling gear for guests
• extra big fenders for rough docks
• tools. Wow do I have tools. Power tools like sanders: big orbital, small orbital, detail sander, drill, jigsaw, router, angle grinder, heat gun. Hand tools are pretty standard, but I have a nice little set of specialized bicycle tools (we don't carry bikes but did buy cheap second hand ones here in Brisbane). "Nice to have" tools like a big torque wrench or gear pullers. More esoteric tools like a one sided pull saw, or a 100' tape to measure rigging and sails, 
• pipe wrenches to uhh I don't know - I used it on the last boat to tighten the stuffing box but I have a dripless shaft seal so don't need a big wrench like this. At least it's aluminium.
• cameras. I wrote a blog post about how many cameras we have. It adds up, 2 DSLR bodies, multiple lenses, tripod, flash, a big Pelican box to store them, big camera backpack.
• clothes for winter in BC or summer in the tropics and everything in between
• solar panels and bigger batteries
• extensive paper charts

All this adds up to 1000's of pounds of stuff aboard. It helps to do an annual purge to get rid of junk aboard. I think I'm gonna get rid of that aluminum pipe wrench....and we haven't been using the double inflatable kayak very much...

Ev