The second age of sailing and the future of transport on the BC coast.
by David Shipway
Over the last few years, folks living on the BC coast have watched fuel, ferry and freight costs skyrocket and have worried about the economic survival of their communities. While it’s easy to blame government waste and ineptitude in maintaining maritime infrastructure, there are other unavoidable factors driving change in our patterns of coastal life.
Peak Oil has arrived, and the bumpy downslope will change everything we have taken for granted,especially transportation and construction technologies.
Unique, regional expressions of these evolving technologies will continue, although planetary interconnectedness allows advances in any one region to quickly spread around the world.
Coastal transportation of people and freight will gradually revert to a pattern that predominated before the age of oil. But we won’t be able to just rebuild the coastal steamship services, since they were based on coal. There will be a far greater reliance on sail, using diesel engines as little as possible, incorporating solar-electric and hybrid drives. Such technologies depend on the variable and less predictable energies of Nature – the sun, wind, and weather.
Many think the Age of Sail ended when coal-fired steamers took over maritime freight. It seemed that way at the time, as sailors abandoned the old wooden windjammers for steel-plated coal-powered vessels. But sailing is still in our blood, and over the last 100 years, the quest for speed, economy and durability in recreational sailing has inspired tremendous advances in sailing and boatbuilding technology.
Many of the new materials – both in polymer and fibre – are derived from Earth’s fossil reserves, but the strength and durability of these new composite systems make vessels last longer and perform better. Making components for sailing vessels is certainly a better use of oil than setting it on fire, which we do with most of it now. Steel is a carbon-intensive material. Environmental and energy scientist Vaclav Smil believes the Iron Age will wind down as cheap fossil carbon becomes more scarce and as climate change threatens our survival.
Forests and trees soak up and store more C02 as they age, and making wood composite vessels will also require higher quality mature wood, so there are two reasons we should abandon short-rotation junkwood silviculture in our coastal forests and start planning an old growth forestry for a very different future market.
Greenpeace retired their old fuel- guzzler ship and designed a new Rainbow Warrior III, a good example of the peak-oil transition ahead, using alternative technologies that reduce our ecological footprint.
This new vessel is a 60-metre high-aspect, sail-driven ship using recycled metals and advanced polymers. Her double 50m A-frame aluminum masts and rigging by Rondel, with 1200m3 of sail, can take her and her crew around the world on the wind. Of particular note is their conscientious use of a new non-toxic bottom coating for the vessel called Ecospeed. Hull coatings have been the achilles heel of the maritime world, but as various jurisdictions ban copper paints that leach toxins into the marine environment, new industrial solutions, such as Ecospeed and Intersleek have focussed on coatings that are hard, smooth and slippery, making boats easier and safer to clean, with the added benefit of far better fuel consumption when the wind isn’t blowing.
Here on the BC coast, sailors can travel fifty to a hundred miles a day for free on favourable winds if they are willing to match their goals and schedules to the weather. Many coastal ferry routes run a reach across both prevailing winds, so various forms of sail-assist are definitely a viable means of radically reducing fuel consumption.
As globalization and growth founders in a post-peak-oil world, we enter a new era of localization, abandoning frivolous, excess consumption. When necessary, large freighters may remain the most energy efficient means of transporting bulk goods around the world, but experimental parasail drives on these huge ships can already reduce fuel consumption by half. Trade and industry will not come to a grinding halt as fossil fuel prices increase, especially on the water. A second Age of Sail is just beginning.
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David Shipway is a Cortes Island woodworker, designer, builder, and shipwright.
[From WS November/December 2011]