I've been amazed for years how often schooners sail out of Camden, Rockport and Rockland, all summer long. Sure they have to power some days, but they look like they sail, a lot! And then the big schooners I see all along the coast, they sail a lot too.

So I asked a friend who's family has run the daysailing schooner trade for around 3 decades, "What % of the time, do you sail?". Here's his experience;

"""Percentage-wise, I'd have to say that it's probably in the 90-95% range for daysailers. Our boat had such a loud engine, we really tried to run the engine as little as possible. And you only need about two knots of wind to make the boat move, and any movement under sail is better than movement under power. If I did a dozen days of sailing for my parents over the course of a summer, with four trips a day, I'd guess that probably three or four trips (not days) were exclusively motor-driven. We certainly didn't always make it out to Chadwick Cove on Lassel Island, but I and my passengers always had fun nonetheless, even if we only cruised a mile or so along the coast.

The bigger schooners are a slightly different story. They're so big, they take a little more oomph to get moving. Also, the yawl boats allow you to nudge the boat forward without it really seeming like the engine is on at all. So I'd say that the percentage of time exclusively under sail is a bit lower, probably in the 75% range. The weekly schooners, too, often need to leave port earlier in the morning and so need to fire up the yawl boat before the breeze builds. But it was a rare day when we didn't gather the passengers by early afternoon and haul the yawl boat up into the davits for some pure sailing. And anchoring under sail wasn't really the exception, it was more the rule (hard to back down a schooner like that with a yawl boat, better to let the wind and a backed foresail set the hook).

Maine winds are fickle? I'd strongly beg to differ. My boat(his own sailboat-not the schooner) is overpowered when the breeze builds past 15 knots or so, and if I had one complaint about it I'd say that my boat is a bit too tender for Penobscot Bay conditions. More days I hesitate to leave the mooring because there's whitecaps on the bay than I don't leave the mooring because there's no wind. Again, it doesn't take much of a breeze to move our little boats."""

That's been my experience as well over a decade and a half. There are not many times we can't sail in Penobscot Bay. The unique part-and reason so many schooners work out of these harbors, are the predictable winds and open geography to utilize them.

But we live here(not cruising through on a schedule). That helps, we have more time to sail where and when, even if we're 'working'.