sails' MPH (miles per hour of use)
Nero was dead on-you COULD think of a new sail as a "full tank" in many senses of the word(s). You can use them for so many miles, and as he says, "actual mileage may vary" with how much of a "leadfoot" you are.
Thankfully for cruisers, who CAN measure their sails' life in miles, the really high end racing sails like on the AC class yachts, measure the life of sails in terms of number of tacks!!! And not very many of them! So these sails *(like a HEMI) do not get very good mileage. Also, the higher quality sail gets better mileage.
Forgive me for taking some offense (well, maybe umbrage instead) when I hear the price of a new sail lamented. Good quality sails (as opposed to mass produced, lower quality sails) have become some of the most labor intensive, lowest profit products that can be purchased, and the folks who build them take a huge amount of pride in them. In fact, good sails, like the $3500 mainsail, are a bargain once you look into the whole process of design, material selection, construction, and after market support that a reputable sailmaker puts into a new sail...They are a highly engineered product-not a commodity, and I don't hear the same complaints about radar, or autopilots-and these are much more of a commodity than sails-yet we seem happy to drop thousands on these things, but the price of a good sail seems to really bother some of us...
Not that I am sensitive....:nerd:
Cheers!!!