Sailing, simplicity and sustainability
Sailing is surely the purest form of travel. Ah, to traverse the world with nought but a bellying sail; to harness the mighty power of nature merely by swigging on a few halyards and waggling a tiller - what more perfect way can there be to get from A to B?! And what more environmentally friendly? Sailing has no carbon emissions! None!
Last week I found myself back skippering a sail training boat I used to spend a lot of time on. She sails superbly (for a gaffer), and I've had great times on her - and found many fantastic friends on board. Yet, on this trip I found myself getting a mite frustrated. The truth is that she's lost her innocence, her simplicity. The poor boat has become encumbered with gadgets, and they all suck power. There is a fridge to keep food cold; a diesel heater to warm us again when we've eaten our ice cream. The gas cooker now has a fancy power-hungry solenoid valve rather than a gas tap, with a control panel with red buttons, flashing leds and dire warnings. The chart table is surrounded with dozens of instruments that beep and flash, dominated by a huge fancy modern chart plotter with an enormous glowing screen. There is a Navtex. A radar. A complicated wind indicator. Two radios. A log. A GPS. Depth sounder. An Inmarsat - a fancy satellite communications system. (It has it's own big computer screen. It was designed to have a printer attached too however, and complained by beeping in a quiet but maddeningly insistent way, until someone caved in and bought the printer to keep it happy. It sits above the chart table - no-one ever uses it).
It's not just the instruments that have bred and multiplied. The way power is used has changed too. A generator has been installed to keep pace with the electricity use - in itself not necessarily a bad thing, as for a given charge to the batteries, a generator will give that power a lot more efficiently (and quieter) than a propulsion engine. However, now that the generator is there, it seems quite the accepted thing these days to switch it on to merely power a toaster in the mornings!
Of course, being skipper, I could be the kill-joy who forbade toast-making (eat cake, I pronounced, for we had plenty of that, and after all, as well as being bad for the planet, it wasn't very friendly to our neighbours in a quiet anchorage to stick a smelly noisy generator on, was it?). I could (and did) switch off the chart plotter and tell the second mate to get the dividers out. ("It's good training for you"). I turned the freezer off the first evening - the food would keep cold enough for a few days, and we could make do with tins on the last day. I could nag the crew - incessantly - to switch off lights when they were finished with them. I could make them up anchor and hoist sail at 4am to catch the outgoing tide from the river, rather than rise at a more salubrious hour, but have to burn diesel to make progress against the flood.
Alas, despite my attempts at economy, the batteries still slowly drained. On the final morning, just a couple of hours from base and a shore connection, I had to admit defeat as the radio died, the gas solenoid beeped mournfully and prevented us from putting on the kettle for a cup of tea, and the lights began to dim. The batteries were empty. There was no option but to turn the evil generator on and pump some CO2 into the atmosphere.
Is it possible in this day and age to keep sailing pure and simple, and fossil-fuel-free? I think it is. I suppose there are two possible approaches. One is to become a luddite - an approach I personally am all in favour of. When I go sailing I want to sail; I don't want the roar or smell of a diesel engine to accompany me. My own little yacht, Teal, is as simple as I could make her. I chucked out the motor she came with, and found a pair of oars instead. Electrics I kept to the absolute minimum for safety - navigation lights, a handheld VHF radio, and a depth sounder (arguably, even that was a luxury - and for at least half the long voyage I did on her, it didn't work anyway). Teal got me to the Arctic circle and back, burning just a couple of cans of paraffin in the stove and Tilley lamp, and I had more adventures in that boat than you could pack into a entire fleet of Sunsail yoghurt pots in the Med.
But if you must have your gadgets, that is possible too, for the other approach is simply to get the power for them from a more sustainable source than diesel. On a boat, that's pretty easy - there is plenty of sun and wind around, so solar panels and wind turbines work well.
I suppose the narrowboat I live on is kitted out more along those lines. While I'm happy to live a frugal existence while sailing, I do enjoy a few more luxuries in my permanent home - a laptop for example, decent lighting, an inverter to run power tools. I even run an electric propulsion motor from the battery bank on the narrowboat, so I don't burn diesel even when I'm moving her. It does require a big array of solar panels - but it's perfectly practical.
For the average yacht or sail training boat, a compromise is inevitable. I would argue that keeping things simple is to be welcomed on a sail training boat. Part of the experience is to leave the luxuries of modern life behind for a few days. So lob the chart plotter overboard and wear an extra fleece rather than turn the heater on. Banish the freezer too: it's perfectly possible to last a week without frozen food. Just eat more fresh veg rather than lumps of frozen meat from unhappy intensively farmed animals. (Surely in fact that would be a good thing to do anyway?... but don't get me started on that one...)
It has to be (grudgingly) admitted that some gadgets do bring tangible safety benefits. In a world of dense shipping lanes it's mildly foolish not to have the correct radio channel and a radar for poor visibility. Some use of electricity is inevitable - but it should not be hard to reduce power consumption on the boat to a level that could be provided for by a few solar panels.
Would that not be a good thing? The purpose of sail training is, after all, the development of the young people who come along. Taking them out of range of a mobile phone mast, away from their ipods and TVs and convenience food is all well and good in itself - but to substitute an awesome experience of nature at her wildest, while demonstrating respect and care for the environment they have become a part of... well, heck, would that not be even better?