If you left south or central Calif and only had a boat with sails, how many days would it take to reach which other states/territories/nations, etc.? Is it easier/faster to go from or to Calif from these places with only wind sails?
Thanks. 
I don’t think you’d ever get to North Dakota.
Sailing to Hawaii is pretty common for the hard core sailing crowd. In a small boat, it’s about three weeks. Depends on the weather, of course.
I’m not sure about the prevailing winds and current so can’t speak more generally than that.
One of the biggest sailboat races in the world is the Newport (CA) to Ensenada Race (MX). The record I believe is about 11 or 12 hours, but the slight breeze this year made it into a 17 hour trip for the winners.
Of course there are tons of factors involved, the wind speed and direction, the type of boat, etc.
Can you sail through the Panama Canal?
Just wondering.
Tris
I can’t imagine that you could literally sail thru, if that’s what you mean. The locks take time to fill/empty, and you couldn’t just tack inside them waiting to get to the next one.
Another fairly famous race is the Transpac, from Los Angeles to Honolulu, run every two years, it looks. Next up is early summer, 2007.
http://www.transpacificyc.org/
(I heard about this in a local Parks & Rec sailing class.) One point of the discussion was the need to head south from Los Angeles to pick up the better currents and winds, then head to Hawaii on a simple, direct, fast course. The link shows the courses the participants took.
Me, I don’t have quite that much nerve, nor the boat that would be needed.
I can’t imagine why they’d keep you from using the Panama Canal, if you otherwise had the equipment and ability to get so far. Though I imagine they might put you into a lock with as many other boats as they could. Don’t have any real facts on that.
Er, this kind of sailing - any sailing, for that matter - is not for the untrained, in my limited experience.
It would probably take you a couple of years, but you could probably do it. California to New Orleans by sea (with or without the Panama Canal), then the Mississippi River to the Missouri River. The main problem would be that the prevailing winds are Westerly, so you’d have to wait for the periodic hurricane to drive you up the Mississippi to the Missouri, then you’d have a really long wait between periodic weather systems to let you sail West and then North on the Missouri to get into North Dakota.
The great clipper records were in the neighborhood of 100 days from San Francisco to New York. An ocean going yacht would probably not be as fast as a clipper, full rigged, so the trip would be several days longer (at least), and Boston would be a bit longer, still, while Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston, Miami, Mobile, Biloxi, New Orleans, Houston, and Galveston would be correspondingly fewer.
Best way to find out is to start sailing.
Even poor folks in the middle of the country can do really fun things.
What other sort of sails are there?
You could lower the sails, though.
It’s common for yachts to go through the Panama and Suez canals. They would motor through, though, not sail.
Solar?
Boats are towed through the Canal. Most yachts share the locks with a cargo ship or a flock of other yachts.
The Missouri is only navigable up as far as the Gavins Point Dam near Yankton, SD. You’d have to pull a Fitzcarraldo there, and also around three other dams in South Dakota (Fort Randall, Big Bend, and Oahe) before you made it up to North Dakota – and that’s assuming that the Missouri is even deep enough for your ship at such extreme reaches. I can’t imagine that the OP would allow portage on such a grand scale.
Ok, so how about from California to Japan?
The world record for the San Francisco to Yokohama run had been a bit over 19 1/2 days but was beaten, recently, with a time of 14 days, 19 hours, 4 minutes and 4 seconds. If you keep an eye on “geronimo san francisco” in Google News™ over the next few days, you’ll probably see the old Yokohama to San Francisco time beaten. (I have not found mention of the Geronimo departing Yokohama, yet, but I did not spend a lot of time looking.)
Of course, with a reduction of time of 20%, it is clear that we are dealing with new high-tech solutions to the challenge. I have not yet discovered what the old tall ship records were for that trip, but I suspect that they would have been somewhere in the range of 25 days traveling West and a bit shorter traveling East.* Even those times would have been extraordinary efforts by specially built ships. “Normal” times would proably be closer to a month.
- (The trade winds in the Northern temperate zone are west-to-east. However, the sea route to Japan typically includes a stop at Hawaii which is sufficiently South that the trade winds are east-to-west. I do not actually know how much time sailors spend in each region of easterly or westerly winds, although if I were attempting to set a record from Japan to the U.S. that ignored old journeys, I would take the Great Circle route, ignoring Hawaii, shortening the trrip, and keeping the wind at my back for the whole way. Of course, that would not knock down any records that followed the traditional path.)