Our trips are meant as vacations, not sail-training 🙂 – so we do our best to balance out about half a day on the water, half a day with time to explore ashore.
In the Med, the distances tend to be shorter; 3-4 hrs sailing time would be an average. We generally get up and out early in the morning, giving us plenty of time to sail – then time ashore later in the day. When it gets busy, it’s a great policy to be “out first, in first” – to get the best spots on the dock!
In SE Asia, the distances are sometimes longer – there will be some days when we might sail 5-6 hours to get to somewhere particularly spectacular. Most of our boats here are wide, spacious catamarans, with plenty of shaded space to spread out – so the extra time on the water isn’t exactly hard to take :).