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Like so many evil things, it worked.

This is Scotch-Gard, and like it says on the can, it's a "heavy duty water repellent". It used to be quite common to see people set up a tent on a sunny day and spray the hell out of it with a can of this. And it worked. The other place you could see cans of it flashing in the sun was over biminis and dodgers in spring as it would waterproof all but the most ragged of "cockpit cloth", and would do a fair job making cheapo nylon jackets imitate Gore-Tex or other miracle water-resistent "high-tech" gear. You'd have to get closer than a boat-length to realize you were looking at at $20 Boat Show special instead of Gill Offshore Whathaveyou sweltering under new Sunbrella.

Turns out, however, that the various formulations of Scotch-Gard weren't great for the environment or, likely, for human health, and it was phased out...although it is still available for sale in many places, which is somewhat of a mockery of the process.

While alternatives to Scotch-Gard exist under the category of durable water repellents, some are very expensive and do not either work well or last particularly long. Others can compromise the breathability of clothing, which is something people pay big bucks for, particularly in foul-weather gear.

Throw in the nicest Spinlock DeckVest and we are cresting $1,300 and you still have a bare ass.

So when I came across this somewhat surreal video...

...I had to look more closely. "Ultra Ever Dry" is the product of an industrial firm that seems to specialize in oil spill containment, absorbent pads and decontamination of the type required when the trainload of peanut oil hits the abbatoir at speed. Apparently, it's superhydrophobic, a term I only grasp thanks to being one of four kids taking Latin in high school. I find it significant that it's some sort of industrial goo that's got nearly 5,000,000 YouTube views.

Just watch the video. I won't spoil it for you. I will just say that if this stuff really works as shown, and won't give you buboes atop of tumours, or children with sunroofs and gills, it could be an incredibly useful product all around the average cruising boat. That's a place where, as you might assume, things are always getting wet.

Propositioning, or getting a right shafting, Part 2

Machinations and fabrications, it's all getting done aboard the beached steel whale known as Alchemy. This proper update is primarily pictorial, most of this tending toward the self-explanatory.

Measure for measure, this bargain digital micrometer has been very useful

Keen-eyed followers of this record of minor achievement may recall that I needed a different Aquadrive-to-engine flange adapter plate, as I had gone and changed engines. These sort of things can happen when one buys boat gear three or four years out of sync with the actual completion of specific systems. Eh, je ne regrette rien.

The new adapter plate, obtained at a turn your head and cough price from the efficient and knowledgeable Brent of Mermaid Marine of Charlottetown, PEI, proved sufficiently Germanic in its honed exactitude to pass the penultimate fitting, of the dry kind. But a number of processes had to come to fruition before a real live welder was brought in to lay the strong seams.

For one, the engine stringer stages had to be fabricated.

A bridge over troubled bilges.

...and laid in place...

Yes, this will be cleaned, primed and painted. All of it.

Then the engine had to be flown and "blocked" with planks designed to stop (or at least slow) its descent should the chain fail fail during the welder's labours noted in a recent post.

Only apparently half-assed: This reinforcement has raised and lowered the engine a few dozen times with nary a creak.

In order to raise the engine above the level of the pilothouse floor, which itself was necessary to place planking under it and give maximum scope to anyone working in the engine bay, some modifications were made to raise the cross-beam about one foot higher than originally designed.

Not seen is how damn frosty and windy that day was. Or indeed most of days during which this work has been done. Boo-freakin' hoo. I'm Canadian. It's character building, this boat building.

The touch-up colour for Beta Marine engines is Plasti-Kote Enamel 209. Now you know.

That one-belted double wheel is the "double power take-off" custom selected for this engine. It will enable either two smaller alternators to be run (redundancy) or one alternator and an engine-driven compressor or bilge pump.

Reaming the cutlass bearing. Like most boat related activities, it sounds like nasty slang from a drama set in a particularly grim prison.

Getting the new Aquamet 22 shaft in was enough of a two-man trial that myself and the redoubtable Captain Matt have renewed confidence in the integrity of the Thordon Elastomeric cutlass bearing getting oiled up in the previous shot. There's plenty of life left in it to judge by its reassuring lack of play.

As for this shaft, it's arguably the strongest thing aboard.

Back inside, the engine mounts looked "dry-fit OK".

Thanks to the four-inch tall stringers, there's plenty of clearance below the oil pan and above the as-yet unplumbed and somewhat provisional day tank.

One minor difficulty was resolved by the removal of the lowest pilothouse companionway step, which will be hinged shortly in order to allow fabricated engine bay doors to open along the entire length of the engine bay opening.

Now you see it...

...now you don't. The bungees hold the tongue and groove trim over the steel bulkhead in place.

The needed adapter arrived and was found Aquaquate, so to speak.

Adaptation of the species

After that pricy little item went on, we had to slip on the Packless Sealing System, confusingly and redundantly frequently called the "PSS Shaft Seal". The principles on which this popular device operates are well known enough that I won't recount them here, but the important bit for the novice to grasp is that this replaces the traditional flax-string stuffing box, which is the only barrier between the sea and the interior of the boat via the prop shaft's "tunnel".

I could grow fond of the accordion.

Traditional stuffing boxes must drip as part of their operation. PSSes do not. On a steel boat, this is desirable and worth the cost of purchase.

Set-screws on the shiny part against which the "bellows" of the PSS presses are a touch unusual in that they are stacked one atop the other. I have to obtain spares of these little hex bolts should I ever, Neptune forbid, have to disassemble any of this stuff.

After the welding came the drilling and the fitting. If this process seems excruciating, time-intensive and laborious, it's because it is. The idea is to line up the new engine on its new mounts and stringers with the old shaft log (and the new shaft, new prop, etc.) as if it was a solid coupling. The Aquadrive is there to mitigate vibration, to isolate shock loads from shifting on the transmission, and to allow "play" in the engine's drivetrain so that wear is greatly lessened on the component parts.

This means the Aquadrive installers must "zero in" on the initial alignment just as with a more traditional boat drivetrain installation. Another parameter that has to be addressed is the proper torquing down of the bolts that connect the shaft to the "yoke hub" and the CV joint to it and the engine's flange.

The old prop serves an unaccustomed purpose.

This is done with the prop shaft held in place in a somewhat unusual fashion. The old prop and some F-clamped lengths of wood served to keep the shaft still while the bolting down of the part of the Aquadrive that grips the (non-keyed) shaft end happened.

Torquing about a revolution.

Lest it appear in these photos that I am restoring a rusted-out wreck, most of the visible rust here is actually superficial waste from previous grinding operations. There's little point in removing it until it's warm enough to paint in, I hope, April.

Thus endeth the dry-fitting.

What follows is me finalling the alignment (see Part 3...yes, really) by using a bevel and tiny, tiny movements of the heavy engine until I feel confident that I can scribe drill marks atop the stringers. Then up goes the motor again, down goes the drill and in go the engine mounting bolts.

Is this my good side?

There's no point in putting on the new prop and Shaft Shark or indeed painting all this until it's all aligned to an obsessive level of precision, or to whatever level of which I am capable. Then back goes Mister Rudder. There's a day tank to create and a new instrument panel and engine controls (and some provision for temporary fuel and batteries) to install next. Seems a lot of work to drive to a dock all summer, but such are the baby steps of Adventures in Refitting.

Introducing "the one-fingered boat"

What's the current phrase? "I'll just leave this here":

Behold the brave new world of recreational sailing. This design from a very reputable firm is  conceptually divorced not only from our own experience of sailing, but in most respects (apart from the clever stowage notions I like to poach from newer designs) is very different from the direction we are going with our refit, which is notable for the complexity involved in making things simple, strong and enduring

So for us, "one-fingered" has a particular meaning in this superficially harmless product spiel, and quite another when put against the agenda of a sail voyaging family planning to be several thousands of kilometres from the nearest Swedish electrician.

And a sailing family, I might add, have come to appreciate the implacable enmity of electrical circuitry and salt water. Or even Lake Ontario's dampness, really.

I have considered Halberg-Rassy to be, along with Oyster and Swan Nautor and J-Boats, to be in the top tier of production builders. You can reasonably predict who I consider to be in the bottom tier. If they've gone this route, it must be because "the market" demands it. No builder of such an unlikely and fickle purchase as a forty-odd-foot sailboat can afford to ignore potential buyers, even if they require the largest sort of training wheels and soft-spot helmets. So the absence of a peek into the engine/machinery spaces, or a look at where the vast amount of batteries must be stored to power this push-button boat is perhaps purposefully absent. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" should be on every bill of sale, perhaps.

An early meeting with the Hallberg-Rassy focus group, perhaps?

So here's a little test for readers, a little "market research" for this benighted boat blog, if you will. There are no right or wrong answers, merely opinions.

Watch the video and submit answers to the following questions:

• 1) What is interesting about this design, and why?
• 2) What is questionable about this design, and why?
• 3) What is problematic about this form of new yacht review?
• 4) Would you consider purchasing this boat, or a boat similar to it for your own use?

Answer any and all. If I get sufficient response, I'll consider sending a small, nautically themed prize to the best (meaning in this case most insightful) reply. Consider it my own form of market research, in this case to reveal biases of the readership of a sooty, overextended and cold boat refitter trying to stay a half-step ahead of his own ignorance and talent for self-injury.

Clearly, and rarely, with this video,  I am somewhat at a loss for words here, although I did find notable that the question "how does she sail?" is not asked until the final two minutes.

Medium rare to weld done

Still capable of burning down the garage, but you have to start somewhere.

Having found it periodically problematic to find a welder to do many of the jobs required aboard Alchemy, I've resolved to learn how to weld myself. But the currently strained budget and my book-only knowledge makes a slow, careful and heavily protected start with the equivalent of a welding toy, in this case a discounted Lincoln MIG-Pak 140 model. This is a gasless wire-feed flux core type (or gas shielding can be used) suitable for light gauge steel and aluminum. I can get my weld on with essentially scraps, or pieces from Metal Supermarket, and make my inevitable learning-curve screw-ups cheaply. I can also compare and contrast the results of "gasless" versus "shielded" welding. I am already aware that there are definite advantages to shielded welding, but my needs are essentially low-volume, will be done in the open air, and are rarely concerned with end-product appearance, merely strength. There is very little I will make for myself that won't be immediately primed and coated in Something Two-part and Industrial.

The advantage to this particular welding unit for me is that it runs on standard 120 VAC current, although at its highest setting, suitable for 1/4-inch stock, it needs a 20 amp circuit. I figure that I can even use the relatively wee Honda 2000 to power it at half its settings, which would suffice for making brackets and the lighter sort of frames.

Anyway, the steel fabrications I had made a few weeks back for the engine stringers and the thrust bearing "yoke" have been for the last couple of weeks clamped and scribed in place:

To be primed and painted and drilled, etc.

Built to get the shaft, and to like it. Damn, sailing's rough practice.

What was proving difficult was getting hold of a welder to do the actual "melt it to the boat" bit. Greg the Welder, who fabricated our solar panel arch and welded it to Alchemy lo! so long ago, was barely contactable by phone, and despite his best efforts, admitted he was booked until April.

We launch in April. Not good.

I asked a welder at the club if he wanted the job, No, he said, but he put me on to another semi-retired other welder/club member, who already said in the past that he didn't want the job, but who might have an apprentice up for it...sometime...

Argh.

Treblex, the Mississauga-based metal fabrication firm,whose work impressed me and Capt. Matt, my "installation advisor", put me in touch with a couple of names. One called back right away, but said he'd need about a week and a half to get to me. The second guy whose name Treblex gave mecould've been by in three days, but in a mounting sense of panic at the passing days of winter, I'd already booked Welder Number One. Welder Two has some designs for various fabrications I need, and as some marine fabricators have already turned me down, albeit in a helpful manner, for being too piddly a client to work for, Welder Two might get those jobs after all.

Diamond Sea Glaze made this for Beth and Evans of S/V Hawk. I am not her, alas, and I think DSG have gone a bit higher-end. Evans was kind enough to correspond with me about how it has worked on the Big Real Ocean.

Welder One called back unexpectedly earlier this week and said "his guy, Jeff" could drop by Thursday morning. Which is how we got to here, finally:

Fire in the hole!

This is the by-now tiresomely familiar sight of the Beta 60 being kept in suspense. The process was "put welder and gear down hole; raise engine to reveal welding job; place planks as 'safeties' in case chain fall fails; reverse steps to free welder".

He was quite capable of cutting his way out, if I went for a walk or something

The misty appearance is the smoke from burning primer, for which I was lightly chided by Welder Jeff for being too witless to remove prior to his Smith God routine. Bad skipper!

Possibly not to code, but the gantry mods I made were apparently sufficient

The stringers were continuously welded at both ends and "stitch welded" periodically along their sides, Welder Jeff assuring me that this was more than sufficient to stay attached should the seas boil and the winds howl, etc.

The weld is so bright, I've got to wear shades

Here's where the thrust bearing got welded directly to the hull.

And where the Skipper figured out a better camera angle other than "straight down".

Yikes. I went to ground level to confirm my approaching date with bottom paint.

These are "heat marks". They are evidence of "successful penetration". Write your own joke here.

Yep, that's burning bottom paint. Oh, well, now I know how to relate stuff on the inside to stuff on the outside.

Boat osmosis or lava? You decide!

The other side was equally spot-fried, but not, I was assured, "all the way through". Well, I would hope not. That could impede sailing plans. Welder Jeff actually commented that the steel hull at the turn of the bilge was "surprisingly beefy, probably three-eighths of an inch thick or better". Thanks, Welder Jeff. I feel better already.

Now that this particular skills bottleneck has been cleared, I could write, and may yet write, an entirely separate post on the struggles I've had finding tradespeople (marine and otherwise) who were a) competent, b) reliable, c) not extortionate and d) in existence. A brief confab with Jeff on the state of his world underlined how busy he is, how very few young people are going into the trades, how "no one wants to get their hands dirty", and if they do, they are making craploads of money in Fort McMurray.

Short of encouraging our son to go into the trades so he can support his poor, old, by-then salt-encrusted mum and dad in our mutually pensionless dotage, I can do no more. Well, I can try to improve my own skills to lessen my reliance on others, who aren't likely to be found in tropical lagoons anyway.

That's how this post began.

On Monday, we move to the final positioning, the drilling of the stringers to take the motor mounts, and the final dry-fitting of shaft, coupler and prop with the various extras. Onward, upward, spendward.

Strutting and gassing and lighting

How hard can two rectangles be? I guess we will find out.

Recently, I've had to research every type of "gas spring", which is the name of the category, by the way, for the lifting mechanism of every sort of hatch or platform that is heavier than something a simple bronze or stainless strut would hold open with confidence, which is why it's top of mind.

Related project to the engine bay "clamshell" hatches: For them to open, the last step into the pilothouse must raise or lower out of the way.

The ongoing engine stringer/thrust bearing project (more on this soon) was made easier by the removal of the lowest step of three going from the aft deck down into the pilothouse.

Watch that last, missing step. It's a doozy.

Removing this gives enough "air" to get a welder down and around that engine, which needs to be flown up and secured once the welder is down with all needed gear. It also would be latched in the up position when the bay hatches are upright. After a bunch of fruitless searching for a folding bracket that would fold up, and not down, and yet could support a human's weight in a seaway, all I could find was something representing overkill in several respects:

Works in the right direction, but is too big and too strong.

So my design is much simpler. An eye and hook can secure it, or even a loop of bungee, and a metal "C-strut" can support even the impact weight of a wet crew stomping on it.

Pretty representative of the genre

As for the bay hatches, this type of gas spring is nice, although I could just as easily use the very same sort of sliding hatch strut used on most deck hatches. The doors have to be kept open, and that means only their own weight has to be supported when open. When closed, the frame of the "bay hole" itself, plus the overlapping center "lip" does that job, unless my design, currently under review by a fabricator, is insufficient.

On the subject of where the backsides go, as the pedestal type of gas spring for helm seats are quite spendy, you could get everything from a bus driver's seat mount to a salvaged barbershop chair base to accomplish the same action in a compact manner.

Priced with the customary "Marine means times three" factor

We actually tried to acquire a "salon chair" for $99 last year, but we didn't get a call back. Might have been a dodged bullet, as I suspect the pedestal to seat plates and pedestal to floor connections are both robust and less prone to corrosion than barbershop specs typically are.

The reasons for this particular line of enquiry is because there is a height discrepancy between my wife (and my son for the near term) and myself. We therefore require a helm seat in the pilothouse that can move up and down and fore and aft. Ideally, a sailing helm seat would pivot side to side on some sort of friction fitting, either to make sailing on a heel comfortable (if one was, for instance, on a night watch during a cold rain from the pilothouse in the mid-Atlantic) or to shift side to side in a cross-swell. According to a recent thread I started in Cruisers' Forum, however, that particular sort of pedestal seat base doesn't seem to exist currently. So it may end up being another fabrication job, or we make do with an off-the-shelf solution.

Eh, may be overkill...the measuring tape will confirm, but the arm and foot rests are nice

Strangely, I have done exactly that with the seating solution I envision for the forward workshop. Preliminary designs, taking into account the time likely to be spent in there, the need to shift my weight and the space available, gave me a  very quick idea I might not have otherwise had if I drove a car: a bicycle seat on a post. For better or for worse, I am used to bike saddles, and I can literally salvage everything I need out of my garage. I can even make it spin...

I'm looking forward to this part of the rehab, actually. It's probably within my skill set to do it right.

Back to the "strutting", I need to investigate gas springs for my engine bay hatch and my steel forepeak deck hatch, both of which will be "unlight". Another dinette-weight project will be the new saloon companionway steps I am planning to frame up, which will cover eight Trojan L16s in a welded, stepped box, which will themselves contain battery boxes for each pair. One of the very few things I like about current showroom queens are the gas springs that allow a companionway hinged at the top to rise with a kid's grade of arm strength and stay put under pulled down, much like a well-fitted sash window.

This is bigger than I'll need...it's from a Beneteau 55... but picture something similar going up like a van's rear hatch.

The point is to take all the half-ton of batteries I intend to carry right to the CE of the entire boat, meaning I can dispose of the lead pigs acting as trim ballast forward...and replace it in part with tools and spares.

The gas springs used for truck engine hoods should be about the right size. You could use gas springs in combination with a locking strut in a number of applications around the boat in a similar fashion, including fold-away or fold-up table or nav station surfaces.

Lastly, today's hot boater tip is that Lee Valley seems to be selling moddable warm white and coloured LED strips for a price I find reasonable, and will do so for bulk discount. Many sailors have for many years been taking out the old auto-type 12VDC incadescent bulbs in favour of LEDs, particularly as the first-generation "cold and bluish" type have declined in favour of "warm white. But this Lee Valley system is more or less snap-together, looks nice (I've seen them in person) and dimmable, all attributes that are like catnip to the amp-conserving average boat fixer. I saw the RGB ones and thought "hey, go from 'blended' white to pure red in the pilothouse with the turn of a pot dial? I can get behind that!"

Part Lite-Brite, part Lego.

Naturally,  I think LEDs are the absolute bomb in any boat place that requires small amounts of light (like inside lockers soldered to a 9V battery and a contact/reed switch), or for "mood lighting" under the lips of cabinets aimed up or down.

We are pretty much at the break point between me wiring up strips off a spool obtained from an "industrial concern" and the price of retail at places like Lee Valley. I thought I'd have to make and measure my lighting, but it's going "prêt-à-porter": just buy what you need and screw it down.

The buzz on boat alarms

The deluxe version?

Despite the oft-repeated goals of cruisers to laze in hammocks drinking out of pineapple mugs, the cruising boats used to get to hammock-positive locales are increasingly complex machines.

One could easily neglect to check certain dials, digital displays or indicator lights on the modern boat, and thus fail to note (or have the watchkeeper fail to note) engine overheating, low oil pressure, water ingress or some other potentially fatal condition, like a propane leak or CO build-up, requiring immediate skipperly attention.

A personal favourite

Having had low oil pressure and cooling water overheating issues on our boats in the past, I am a fan of early warnings. There's a gas/propane sniffer on Valiente, along with a CO detector. I typically check for "output" of cooling water at the stern and eyeball the temperature and oil pressure dials of the very basic Atomic 4 control panel, and so haven't bothered with buzzers. On Alchemy, I will install more alarm setups because more of the critical systems could self-destruct without immediately noticing the process, and also because, frankly, there is a lot more at stake than aboard a Lake Ontario day sailer.

And Canadian-made, by gum

Plenty of alarm widgets or alarm systems exist for the cautious/paranoid/typical cruiser, and some are very clever indeed, and cross over into the solenoid or automatic actuator realms.



But I wonder: why don't boat system alarms talk? Cars talk, GPSes talk, even cheap alarm clocks murmur instead of buzz. Even smoke detectors can shout at one. Even personalized smoke detectors exist.

"Get out of the house, ya little pyro!"

Voice recognition, as fans of "Siri" know, is a thing of the present. So why should a host of boat alarms buzz with essentially the same range of tones?


It should not be massively difficult to replace that growing host of various buzzers with the sort of circuitry that is found in “talking/singing birthday cards”, or “talking seatbelt alarms” in cars and the like. Or to rig just the chips capable of holding a two or three word message, along with a small amplifier, to make a personalized alarm.

Imagine hearing instead of some random buzzer in D sharp, you heard your own voice saying “Fuel pump overpressure!” or “Bilge past six inches!” or the very useful “Exhaust temperature past 100C!”
If one did not wish to actually record specific messages, one could simply throw in random…but distinct…noises on pre-recorded chips, like "birdsong means bilges", or "fly buzzing means fuel", and so on.

Functional, but a little HAL 9000

It’s the distinctiveness of the alarm noise that is desirable. Buzzers tend to sound alike, because they all come from the same factory in China, I would imagine. Voices...now, the human mind zeroes in on those in terms of direction and content far more easily. Of course, if you find the idea of a verbal alarm a little creepy, there are some less buzzy options.


Picture combining the “talking alarm” with “The Clapper” for a shut-off, and you’ve got the basis for a marine products empire where the average customer’s age is already well past “I should’ve worn earplugs during that Alice Cooper tour in '72”.

Personally, I am not quite that age, myself, and due to plenty of deafness in my family, I have both nursed my hearing and had it regularly tested; it appears I'm in good nick. Spend time at an average boat club, however, and it's clear a large percentage of Boomers have listened to a few too many booms to hear their pants ringing in anything but a dead-quiet environment...which the sea is rarely.

Like my idea for dim, five-second red LEDs that would be triggered by movement across the sill of companionways at night, or a 9V battery-powered, reed switch-activated, under-lid LED locker light, I do not see a strong objection in cost or complexity of a “talking alarm” to easily distinguish what part of the boat’s systems is complaining.

It only sounds like Star Trek. The actual electronics involved would not be beyond the average electronics hobbyist, which most cruisers already are, because they can't afford not to be. I built kit shortwave radios and repaired my guitar amps as a teen and still do various electrical bench work (I'm trying to reboot an old Furuno radar I found, for instance); I don't think any of this at the level of "home-brewed" is very difficult to rig. If someone's already invented these sort of gadgets, I would enjoy hearing about it. Just not in the form of a buzzer.

"I'm sorry, Skipper, I can't unlock the rum cabinet."

Cargo by sail barge to New York City? It's more likely than you think.

Barging into history to bring Vermont rice to New York City

Most blog runners have the capability to see all sorts of statistics about their posts, and one of the more popular posts I've written is on the mild return of sail and sail-assisted freighters. In the context of a blog about refitting a steel sailboat, my interest in cargo is admittedly academic, but we have considered the pros and cons of schlepping stuff for money, services or "in kind" trade on Alchemy in a fairly basic manner as a viable route to managing costs and making friends in remote places.

Besides, now I have a excuse to rerun this.

In 2013, we aren't particularly distant in time from the last of the working tall ships, which I define as freight carriers of bulk cargo, as opposed to sail trainers, floating classrooms or romantic forms of tourist transport, many of which started life as the last examples of sail-powered freighters.

Behold the mighty arteries of capitalism's advance!

We are more distant in time from the regular use of sail-powered coastal and riverine water transport and that's why in my original post I hadn't considered the older sort of sailing barge or scow. These are the sort of short-haul, shallow-draft cargo vessel for which North America's canal system was built and which formed the backbone of trade in much of the world until railways and marine motors made them unfashionable, and the post-war commitment to truck transport pretty well killed them off save for hobbyists.

Said hobbyists have, however, sufficient documentation so that you can build your own barge

Truck transport, while undeniably flexible as long as the oil holds out, cannot be considered particularly efficient. Water transport, either powered solely by wind, oars and poles, or with small engine assist, is more so.

Coming soon to a river near you

Alas, "more so" is not "clean". As this report from NASA outlines, the regular routes of our (arguably) most efficient ships leaves a distinctly dirty trail in the sea and sky.

When your blow-by can be seen from space, it's time to re-evaluate your ring job.

This level of pollution seems to be one of the more compelling small but intriguing proposals to revive cargo by sail-powered boats and ships.  Another realization is that even the incremental improvement in the energy efficiency of typical powered marine transport is not really holding back the tide of total energy usage; even in places such as Europe (see grotty seas above) where fuel is twice as expensive as in North America, it is proving difficult to use less of the stuff and maintain their economies, already stung by mismanagement.

The sail transport line must be here somewhere

Before I go all "peak oil survivalist" on you, much of the small resurgence in cargo-by-sail is firmly based in economics, which, as the luxury car, fashion, condo and food industries prove, is itself strongly distorted by sentiment and emotion. In other words, most urban people could have an enclosed electric motor golf cart as personal transport, live in 400 square foot recycled abodes, dress in naturally dyed hemp and wool, and eat only enough vegetables to maintain a healthy weight and productive energy levels.

Right....know anyone like that? There are few things more insufferable than a saint. Some douchebags come in green.

If the history of consumerism has taught us anything, it's a) it requires loads of cheap energy to even have the sort of consumerist economy developed since World War II, and b) people will spend a lot of money in order to use less energy, because it makes them feel both virtuous and more in control of the means, or at least the distribution, of production.

A shitty sailer in the best sense of the word.

So where do the barges fit? As Erik Andrus, the guy attempting to build a barge in Vermont to travel down the Hudson River to New York City and back, states:

"Producing food sustainably is not enough.  The other half is sustainable transport of goods to market and equitable exchange.  A good portion of the damage conventional agriculture does to society and the environment is through our overblown, corporation-dominated distribution systems.  The idea of a small, producer-owned craft sailing goods to market, perhaps even a distant market, is an alternative to this system..."

Given how farmers and fishers have been jerked around and nearly "consolidated" out of business by "globalization", it's hard to argue that a farmer who can see a reasonable means of getting his products to market gets to retain a higher percentage of profit. His customers feel virtuous, probably enough to pay a premium...if a premium is even needed. And that's why newly built sailing barges on canals and rivers could yet trump our old friend the 18-wheeler. You just have to plan a little more for a world where goods deliveries "maybe next Tuesday" instead of "overnight", and you have to want to live in such a world. One needn't be a pessimist (warning: long-winded!) to see that world on the horizon, or to anticipate it as a world of opportunities.

And thanks to the miracle of the Intraweb, those who can appreciate the utility...not to mention the economy...of a barge driven by a pivoting sprit- or lugsail are developing their own networks. Certainly, there is both an admiration and a desire to repurpose "heirloom technologies" for a world with ever-rising fossil fuel costs, but like the practical electric car and that personal jet pack I was promised forty years ago would be stock transport by now, only time will tell.