DRAFT

It has been about two years since I became seriously interested in sailboats. During that time, I learned a great deal about boats, sailed a variety of craft around Boston Harbor and the vicinity, bought a boat, fitted it out, moved aboard with my wife and cat, and sailed it all over the eastern seaboard - from Maine to the Carolinas. As I write this, we are taking a break in Charleston, South Carolina, before heading further south into the Caribbean.

As a byproduct of my transition to a life afloat, in August of 2006 I wrote an article, The New Age of Sail ( http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6...) , which some people have found quite inspiring. As happens so often, its inspirational qualities resulted to some extent from my ignorance at the time; had I known what I know now, the cold light of experience would have no doubt tempered the inspirational qualities of this text.

A bit later, in October of the same year, I was invited to give a short talk at the Bioneers by the Bay conference in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on something or other green and sustainable. I took this opportunity to put together a plan for sail-based passenger transport, which could be put into effect once fossil fuel-based forms of transportation start to fail due to fuel shortages.

Early next year, the editors of Orion Magazine came across my presentation, found it interesting, and a summary of it was printed in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion, under the heading "Making Other Arrangements." Here is an excerpt:

The trends that will once again make sail a viable form of transportation are already in place but, for the sake of the argument, let us think a few years forward. Suppose it's 2010, and you want to travel up or down either coast. You might consider driving, but gas is now very expensive and often hard to find. Also, the price of asphalt has gone through the roof, so the roads are full of potholes. You might consider taking a train, but Amtrak has been largely shut down, because the country couldn't afford it. And you might consider flying, but ticket prices have been driven up by the cost of kerosene; plus there is a new terror scare due to intelligence reports of a plan involving elderly Al Qaeda members with exploding dentures, so they make you check everything including your false teeth.

Then you find out about the Sail Transportation Network. You go to the STN website and find several boats planning the passage you intend to make. You go look at the boats, interview the skippers, and decide on one. You then go back to the website and submit payment for STN's finder's fee. On the day of departure, you simply show up at the dock. STN has already provisioned the boat for the passage. You come aboard and sail off. If you are so inclined, you can take part in various quintessential sailing activities, such as baking bread, cooking stew, mixing drinks, and keeping a lookout.

The Sail Transportation Network is just a concept at the moment, but I remain reasonably assured that there are no legal or technical obstacles to making it work.

At the time, I thought that this was a perfectly reasonable plan. There followed some discussion about developing some web software that would make the system self-organizing. There was also some talk of organizing a trial run by signing up some skippers and some passengers. None of it came to fruition.

I thought that this plan was reasonable because it avoided several problems.

The first problem is that sailing vessels, of the sort that can be used for freight or passenger transport, no longer exist. There are some historical replicas, some navy training ships, and some fancy charter boats. But there are plenty of smaller yachts capable of carrying three or four passengers in addition to a skipper and one or two crew members, along with their baggage. At a time when other types of transportation run into problems with the fuel supply, such boats could be pressed into service on coastal passages, provided a way could be found to provision them.

The second problem is that skippers of such smaller craft are rarely licensed to carry passengers for hire, and the vessels are largely registered as pleasure craft, and so cannot be used for passenger or freight service. However, I discovered a loophole that neatly solves this problem as well. According to the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993,

Passenger for hire means a passenger for whom consideration is contributed as a condition of carriage on the vessel, whether directly or indirectly flowing to the owner, charterer, operator, agent, or any other person having an interest in the vessel. Consideration means an economic benefit, inducement, right or profit including pecuniary payment accruing to an individual, person or entity, but not including a voluntary sharing of the actual expenses of the voyage, by monetary contribution or donation of fuel, food, beverage or other supplies.

What this means is that passengers can volunteer to share the expenses of the trip without being considered passengers. Therefore, the skipper of the vessel need not be licensed, and the vessel need not be registered or documented as a commercial vessel, or carry commercial insurance. This dramatically increases the numbers of both craft and crew available to carry passengers by sail.

The third and final problem is that in a situation where transportation fuels are scarce, so is food. The retail chain breaks down as soon as the diesel trucks that supply it are out of diesel. Provisioning a sailboat requires large amounts of basic foodstuffs to be placed aboard: rice, beans, flour, cured meats such as salt tack, salted fish, and so forth. An organization that can directly procure such supplies in bulk, ferry such supplies between ports, and provision vessels for the task of doing so, is well positioned to survive the collapse of the retail chain.

The three problems are addressed by a single triangular arrangement: passengers pays provisioners, provisioners provision boats, skippers transport passengers. It is a good plan - to file away somewhere, ideally in your mind or on paper, because it might be hard to retrieve electronically once the electric grid collapses.

As far as making use of this plan prior to economic collapse, thinking about this may shed some light on the limits to what can be done to organize in preparation for collapse. The problem is far more general than the one we are considering, boiling down to this: in order to organize and prepare for collapse, people need to act as if collapse has already occurred, and this is something that rational individuals will quite reasonably refuse to do.

Why would anyone who is of sound mind be willing to go into the business of provisioning sailboats with rice, flour, cured meat, and pickled cabbage? Sailboat crews prefer fresh-frozen produce, which can be obtained at a supermarket. For bulk items, there are wholesale clubs. Our provisioners may have a viable post-collapse business plan, but pre-collapse it is sheer nonsense.

Why would passengers be willing to spend weeks at sea instead of jumping in a car or on a plane and getting to their destination in a few days or a few hours? Why would they be willing to tolerate sea sickness, confinement, meals hastily thrown together on a galley stove, and the company of strangers in close quarters?

Why would skippers want to take on passengers? Provisioning is one of the least significant costs of owning and operating a yacht, and is not enough to entice a skipper. Many owner-skippers of yachts are wealthy people with less time than money, and when they find time in their busy schedules to go sailing, they prefer to sail with family or with friends. Many other owner-skippers of yachts are retired individuals or couples. The couples are unlikely to want to welcome strangers aboard their home in exchange for food, while the individuals are usually in search of competent crew, to save them from the hard work of single-handing, and would hardly be interested in taking on passengers who cannot take turns at the helm.

Clearly, until collapse occurs, this plan will be dead in the water. But what about post-collapse? Will it automatically become viable as soon as there is a critical mass of hungry skippers with boats, and a critical mass of desperate passengers willing to endure weeks at sea in order to get somewhere, or simply to get away? Will dockside provisioners suddenly rise to the occasion as soon as these two ingredients fall into place? When an economic collapse occurs, our horizon usually shrinks to what we can see for ourselves and the people we can talk to. Most of these people tend to be too busy thinking for themselves and trying to survive, and will have no spare time in which to work on grand schemes or organizational initiatives such as the Sail Transport Network.

But that, to me, seems irrelevant. If the scheme I developed has merit, and if enough people either find out about it by reading what I've written, or by figuring it out for themselves, then it will develop spontaneously. Local farmers will discover that they can sell their crop in bulk by delivering to the dockside and putting it on board a boat. Passengers will discover that they can actually get somewhere by showing up at the dock with some money, and asking about. Skippers will find out that taking on passengers once in a while is a good way to keep the lockers stocked with food.

Does this mean that thinking along these lines is a futile, unnecessary exercise? Perhaps not: by thinking through such ideas ahead of time, it may be possible to make the transition to a post-collapse system of transportation easier for some people.