I doubt that there are any cruisers, who will move anything because of a
new 44 lbs weight in their stern.

I would and I consider myself a cruiser.

And how many besides you? ...

Well, I know quite a few cruisers and delivery skippers who always make
the effort to tune and trim a boat before going on a voyage. I also
know folks who are happy that the sea will "autostow" their gear for
them and don't give any thought to trim at all. How many cruisers are
there in the world in the first category? I don't know. Filtering
through just cruising people I know I'd say maybe 25% of the total and
near 100% of the pro and semi-pro sailors. Will cruisers notice the
difference between a well trimmed boat a poorly trimed one? Some will.
For instance, my girl friend and I recently set sail from New Zealand
bound for Honolulu. Two fully crewed boats run by owners, more in the
"autostow" camp than the careful stow camp, set out on the same route
over a day ahead of us. We overtook both boats just over 72 hours out
and we all pretty quickly ran into gale force head winds caused by a
stalled complex low trapped on a very intense high. I slowed my boat
down to 4-6 knots to make the ride tolerable and continued beating
along the track freeing myself from the crush zone in just over a week.
The other two boats were unable to make good any ground to windward,
both took damage, and when the winds finally relented both were forced
to divert to make repairs an let off crew. One of the two finally made
it to Honolulu nearly two months after we arrived the other never got
here. I am familiar with both boats and I am sure that the reason that
they were stopped by those conditions was because they had paid very
little attention to setting their boats up for efficient sailing. I
suspect that damage that they took was increased because their poor
trim made their boats work harder against the sea than they needed to.
I could list other stories, like my friends who took off from Tonga
headed for Samoa but had to give up and go to Fiji after two weeks
because the couldn't go upwind into the trades and my friends that left
Honolulu bound for the mainland only to return because they couldn't
make way into the trades... In the later case, just a bit of rig
tuning and moving an anchor and it's rode off the bow got them back out
there and off to where they wanted to go.

Now, I don't want to make a judgement on the "correctness" of the two
schools, and I'm not even sure that there are two distinct schools but
suspect a normal curve. I cruise to have fun. My experience is that
the "autostow" folks tend to have a lot of fun and have great stories
to tell at the bar, too. But I do think that it there are times when a
cruiser's life is noticablely better when sailing on a well trimmed
boat.

-- Tom.