Sailing Uma: How Green Do You Have To Go?
To silence the trolls...
Sailing Uma is in some ways a typical modern cruising story: young couple takes off on a boat, seeks support on Patreon, builds a massive following on YouTube (369K subscribers!), lives the voyaging dream. They are also distinctive in this regard: their Pearson 36 has an electric motor and they are hyper-conscious about trying to minimize their environmental footprint. They are the future. I hope.
Recently, while in Svalbard, they noted that the electricity charging their batteries was generated from coal power. To their credit, they started a conversation on Instagram about this:
So here is an interesting conversation starter:
While in Longyearbyen (the world's northernmost town, and main Norwegian settlement in Svalbard) our little electric sailboat, being plugged in at the dock of a town that is running on coal, technically was, for a moment, a coal-powered electric sailboat...
The world is far from perfect! But it opens our minds to be aware of the resources we use. Hopefully, we all as human beings will start using and developing new technologies, to help find alternatives and sustainable solutions to these problems we face today.
It's a goal worth journeying towards!
If you click on the above post and read the comments you will come across lots of interesting discussion about trying to get to zero-carbon on a sailboat, and more than a little climate denialism and judgement about their choices.
Sample:
“Ahh the hypocrisy of anything that claims to be zero emission. A Tesla (and your boat) get their power from coal and gas and oil. They tear up the earth to mine the lithium for your batteries and the raw materials for your solar panels. The cases for your batteries and your boat itself is all made from petroleum. It’s not possible to go sail and not use all the things that most “go green” folks proclaim to hate.”
This is a common criticism for anyone seeking a different, more planet-friendly, lifestyle (which I guess inherently threatens consumerist, carbon-intensive lifestyles): If you are not absolutely pure and perfect you are a failure.
And I want to make a simple point in response: the failure to be perfect is not a failure. Every reduction towards a zero emission lifestyle is still a reduction. None of us is perfect in how we live, and all of us make mistakes. I am an atheist, but as with religion, it is the striving toward the ideal which is important and enlightening. We are all sinners in a sense, but as culture and technology change it will become easier and easier to find our way toward lives that are more in balance with the planet. And it is a couple like Sailing Uma that is helping light the way, especially for sailors. For that they should be celebrated, not trolled. More (zero carbon) power to them!
It’s Not Just Me: I was embarrassed and mortified by the simple yet devastating navigation error I made, which took us to the wrong mark in the AYC Doublehanded Race. The anguish of my failure was slightly (very slightly) eased when I saw on Sailing Anarchy that the famous Peterson One-Tonner Ganbare had lost the 1973 Worlds in part due to rounding a mark the wrong way. Full story of that blunder is here. See, I erred with the best of them. As I say, we are all sinners. I have done full penance, and hope to never sin again. At least not in that way.
Hell Or High Seas: This one looks good. Hell Or High Seas is a documentary which tells the story of a Navy veteran suffering from PTSD who sails embarks with a writer on a voyage around Cape Horn. Reminds of a story I wrote for Outside called The Long Way Back (featuring a former Marine called Ronnie Simpson). Sailing and the sea can heal the most damaged of humans. But it is never an easy treatment. Streaming options for Hell Or High Seas.
Hell Under The High Seas: It is hard to believe that we ever really did this sort of thing, but I was stunned by this recently unearthed video of a 1958 underwater nuclear test. Yeah, yeah, Cold War and all that. But even against the backdrop of that mentality this seems…a little insane. There is a reason the nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer, upon witnessing the first successful atomic test, recalled from the Baghavad Gita the line: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
I can’t watch without imagining all the undersea worlds and lives destroyed by the shock wave and the sound. Not to mention the radioactivity. I wish we could be confident that humanity is on its way to transcending the idea that there is any problem a nuclear weapon can solve. But I don’t think we can. Yet. Lots more detail here.
News Of The Weird: I’ll leave you with this report that our beloved yet mischievous orca gang off the coast of Spain turned its attention to the Mini sailors recently racing across their domain. From the sailors, via Scuttlebutt:
Jay Thompson (USA), 9th in the prototype division:
“This first leg was an adventure from beginning to end. I knew there would be things that would go on during the race that would be unpredictable, but I hadn’t imagined that I’d encounter an orca and that it would make off with the lifting surface of one of my rudders after spinning the boat round 360 degrees! Was I frightened? I didn’t even have the time to be scared as it all happened very quickly.”
Felip Moll Marquez (ESP), 55th in the production division:
“I managed the start of the race well with the exception of one thing: I was attacked by orcas at night, just before the front. I think it was the second day out. They began to push my boat and play around with it. It was frightening!“The front rolled in then, which I handled pretty well. We had 37 knots. It enabled me to escape and get away from the orcas. I didn’t notice any damage to my boat before the severe weather warning. However, my autopilot stopped working … I think the orcas broke it when playing around with my rudder.
“I didn’t sleep for three days as I had to helm non-stop. It was a bit complicated. I don’t really know how I managed to deal with the lack of sleep. I brought the boat to a stop from time to time, but I did have a second autopilot. I tried to install it and in the end it worked!”
Whatever the motivations of our orca friends (overfishing, undersea atomic tests, shipping noise), we probably deserve it.
See you next week…
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Thanks for pointing out the impact of making an effort, instead of waiting for perfection. In the same vein, while I admire the zero waste community, for most people it isn’t practical, so they give up. The point is to reduce personal impact by consciously consuming while at the same time advocating for less harmful systems (like renewable energy). In the Sailing Uma example, they’re relying less on fossil fuels, not completely abandoning them, as they inspire others to follow. Love it!