Re: range on tank of gas
LMAO!!
You've got to understand, Mr Eye, that Tashadaddy (TD) has never grasped the concept of "range", in other words "how far can a boat go". That's why he can't answer your question. (This is almost as good as an oil thread .....
)
Boats are rated in whatever units are relevent to the information desired. If you want weight, then pounds or tons are appropriate. If you want length, feet or inches is appropriate. If you want fuel flow, gallons per hour is appropriate. If you want speed, miles per hour is appropriate.
If you want range, then miles per gallon or miles per ton (if you're burning coal) is appropriate. Since the original poster asked about range, these would be the applicable units.
Gallons per hour is completely useless without the additional information of SPEED, which then allows you to compute miles per gallon.
Example: Three boats all have 60 gallon fuel tanks and want to reach a marina 150 miles away before a storm arrives.
Boat A has a fuel flow gauge. He is burning 15 gallons per hour.
Boat B has a speedometer. He is going 20 miles per hour.
Boat C has both gauges. He is burning 12 gallons per hour at a speed of 36 MPH.
Which one has the range to make it to the marina???
Not boat A. He's going 30 MPH but doesn't know it. When he runs out of fuel after running for 4 hours at 30 MPH, at the 120 mile mark, he dies in the storm.
Not boat B. He's burning 10 gallons per hour but doesn't know it. When he runs out of gas after running for 6 hours at 20 MPH he's at the 120 mile mark also, right next to boat A, so they die together.
Boat C has calculated that at 36 MPH and 12 gallons per hour, he's getting 3 miles per gallon. With his 60 gallon tank that gives him a range of 180 miles. He makes it to the marina in 4 hours and 10 minutes, and goes out after the storm to help look for the unfortunate (stupid) boaters who should have headed for a closer marina.
Anyway, to answer the original question:
Go to Boattest.com and get a free membership just for giving them an email address. Then you can look at performance data of boats similar to yours.
I think a 262 is a V6, here's a chart from an 18' Sea Ray with a fuel-injected V6.
You can see that at 3000 RPM and about 30 MPH it's getting 6 MPG. So you'd have a THEORETICAL range of 120 miles with your 20 gallon tank (their range in the table is based on 90% of fuel capacity and this one has a 26 gallon tank). In real life, your boat isn't brand new and is probably loaded heavier than this test boat. I would guess that you would get a MAX of around 5 MPG, so your range would be a little under 100 miles. A good rule of thumb on a boat is "1/3 out, 1/3 in, 1/3 reserve". So I would say that you could go about 35 miles (7 gallons at 5 MPG) and safely return, as long as you just steadily cruise all the way. Any skiing, tubing, WOT, etc would DRASTICALLY reduce this distance.
