Sailing: The Green Alternative

July 6, 2008

If you’re one of those go fast boaters who likes to roar around the lake, the cost of fuel this summer may keep your boat at the dock. You sit, glum in the back of your fuel guzzling “stink pot” motorboat, and enviously watch those parsimonious sailors happily coasting by on the free wind. Suddenly “rag men” don’t look so dumb after all. Maybe, as the world’s oil runs out, it’s time to consider sailing as a green alternative.
With the possible exception of the water skier and hydrofoil racer, sailing has something for everyone. After all, the main point is to get out on the water, and you don’t have to be rich to do it.
We have an eight-foot 1953 Chris Craft sailing dinghy we picked up for $50 years ago, an 11-foot Styrofoam Sea Snark we were given, and a 22-foot 1973 MacGregor Venture 222 sloop that, if the advertisements were to be believed, sleeps five. (Yes, if two are midgets and adults can cuddle.) We bought it for less than the current price of a Skidoo. A friend here bought an old 27-foot molded plywood sloop for about $1,800. It needed some paint. You just have to shop around.
Note the ages of those craft. If they were automobiles, they’d have long since gone to scrap yard heaven. But fiberglass boats last longer than the original builders ever expected, and ours, though 35 years old, is lacking only a bit of bottom paint to look good as new.
A sailboat is a great investment, and if you can live aboard in cramped quarters, it can serve as a summer cottage without property tax. If wanderlust grabs you, your sailboat might take you around the world.

POKING AROUND
Sailing offers something for almost everyone. It can be as simple as poking around, gunkholing in a day sailor, or getting serious about nautical lore and science. There’s a world of nautical knowledge: hull design, a vocabulary all its own, how to read clouds and the weather, oceanography, fancy rope work, sail making, canvas work if you want to sew a Bimini top or a riding sail, woodwork, navigation by GPS or sextant, VHF radio, depth sounders, nautical charts, specialized hardware, and, if you think going 10 miles an hour on the water is fast, the challenge of racing tactics.
Though some never use them, most sailboats do have engines. We have a 1976 Evinrude 9.9 horsepower outboard that runs all summer on about eight gallons of gasoline. Running all summer even for $40 isn’t bad.
If the weather gets foul, sailboats are safer, too. That mast acts as a pendulum to dampen wave motion. Many are built to be self-righting. Our Venture 222 has positive flotation, and in a serious blow we have a storm jib and a parachute sea anchor to ride out almost anything short of a full gale or a tornado. In case of lightning, the mast provides a cone of safety.
We carry storm sails and three conventional anchors, plus a drogue and a parachute sea anchor. If we do get caught out on Lake Superior, we need only to batten down the hatches and duck inside the closed cabin.
The cost of fuel has put a damper on the sales of big motorboats, but people willing to learn how to hoist and trim a sail are looking seriously at sailboats. They don’t have to be new or large. Robert Manry found an old 15-footer, fitted it out, named it Tinkerbell, and sailed it across the Atlantic.
There’s nothing like hoisting the sails, setting a course, and sitting back to listen to the water passing around the hull as the boat steers itself. You sit back in the cockpit of your sailboat and listen to the flutter of the pennant and the water gurgling past the hull. Imagine yourself sailing the seven seas. Ah, contentment! That’s what summer on the water is all about.

Harley Sachs is the author of “Irma Quarterdeck Reports”, a book of instructional, nautical humor, published by Far Horizons and available in bookstores.