Virgin Territory
Heading north again, and reckoning with my 2024 emissions footprint...
Bonjour. Oh, wait. Wrong language. I am no longer in Guadeloupe or a French-speaking territory. I am in a US territory (St. John, USVI), and I speak the language like a native. Which means that Laughing Gull is already journeying north once again, and Les Saintes will be the southernmost stop for Winter 2024-2025. I approached this winter with a plan NOT to sail all over the place and touch down promiscuously and briefly at a long list of Caribbean islands (I did that years ago and it was exhausting and unsatisfying). Instead, I wanted to burrow in to just a few places: Antigua (done), Guadeloupe/Les Saintes (done), and the USVI, Spanish Virgins and BVI (currently in process). Each approach has its benefits, but these days I enjoy ambling over pressing. Let’s call it Slow Cruising.
Laughing Gull’s jump north through a few degrees of latitude was made possible by the arrival, with LG vet Ed, of a replacement through-bolt for the lower spreader bracket (which fit perfectly, I was relieved to discover). It started with a dawn departure from Les Saintes last Tuesday, and ended with an anchor down in Privateer Bay on the western end of Norman Island in the BVI a night and day later. The intended destination had been Coral Bay on St. John, but Privateer was an hour closer and I could drop the hook there by sundown (Coral Bay would have involved anchoring in the dark in an unfamiliar place, which I try and avoid if possible). After a good night’s sleep it was a short hop to Coral Bay Thursday morning.
The passage was a short one—just 240 miles over 36 hours. It included a lot of good sailing—three-sail reaching at 8-9 knots in medium trades—and, sadly, some motoring. First, to get clear of Guadeloupe’s surprisingly capacious wind shadow, which extended at least 20 miles from its western coast. And then as we approached the VIs and the wind went dead aft and light. The only thing more painful than motor-sailing downwind in almost no breeze and swell is trying to sail downwind in almost no breeze and swell. So we did what we had to do to stay on schedule (Ed had a flight home), and wallowed our way north for the final hours breathing a mix of salty sea air spiced with diesel exhaust.
The overnight was perfection though, with good sailing, just enough chill in the air to suggest a long-sleeved short, and a blaze of stars made brighter by the lack of moon. Laughing Gull charged ahead, alive with motion and the mesmerizing sounds of a taut vessel driven by wind and well-trimmed sails, and parting a dark sea with power and speed. Never assume one gets used to those special moments, and starts not noticing. Part of being human, and having five senses, is that you can’t experience beauty and harmony like that and not be awed every time. If you do somehow lose that appreciation and awareness, then you should probably swallow the anchor. Those are the moments that make all the boatwork and discomfort worth it.
Upon arrival in Coral Harbor, the small town tucked deep into Coral Bay, Ed planned to hop off, catch a cab to Cruz Bay, to catch a ferry to St. Thomas, to catch a flight back to DC. To get to LG in the Saintes, Ed took a ferry, a plane, a taxi and a ferry. So he wins the intrepid crew travel award and maximum LG Award Points (redeemable aboard for reduced cooking and dishwashing duties).
There is no substitute for crew like Ed, though getting from the boat to St. Thomas turned out to be harder than covering many miles of ocean. I submitted a US Customs and Immigration clearance request as soon as the anchor hit the bottom of Coral Harbor, via the very handy US Customs and Border Patrol app. However, there was no immediate response, as on previous occasions, just a notification that my request was awaiting review. With the minutes ticking away, I started to worry that all the federal funds freezing, heightened immigration and border strictures, and general chaos which accompanied the arrival of Trump 2.0 might mean that no one was manning app clearances, or an actual in-person CPB visit might be requested. Which would mean that Ed’s return timetable would fall victim to our current political era.
Technically, we were required to stay on the boat until receiving clearance. But Ed was also having trouble finding a cab to take him from the east end of St. John to the ferry in Cruz Bay on the west end. With two great minds pondering this problem, it was decided that the best strategy for drumming up a taxi would involve going to the popular Skinny Legs Bar and Grill and drinking beer until a solution magically appeared.
This actually turned out to be a good idea. Ed did eventually secure a cab by calling through a list of numbers hand scrawled on a stained beer mat that was given to us by the bar hostess. But I departed LG for shore with trepidation, as running afoul of US Customs and Immigration is something I never, ever want to hassle with. Happily, the clearance text finally pinged onto my phone just as we arrived at the dinghy dock, so we set foot on US soil as (barely) legal vagabonds. That helped make a veggie burger and an unspecified number of cold beers taste all the better.
After Ed departed, I hit up the local market, and secured a few provision. Instead of hanging around Coral Harbor, I raised the anchor and crossed Coral Bay to a well-protected anchorage that looked promising. When I arrived I was the only boat, which always makes me happy. But if one boat anchors the rest will come, and now I have 5 or 6 nice neighbors (you can see exactly where I am and what my world currently looks like, via this live webcam, which is installed at a nice looking—but very expensive—rental house that overlooks the anchorage).
And that’s where I remain, a few days later, indulging in my Slow Cruising routine (I’ll leave shortly to hit up another nice St. John anchorage). Yesterday, I snorkeled over to Pelican Rock, where local boats had been bringing tourists. There was lots of dead or dying reef, as usual. But also a few pockets of reef with at least some life, which was nice to see, including sea fans, rays, and a very shy nurse shark which settled under a ledge as soon as it saw me. The bottom where I anchored, I saw, is mostly the hardscrabble and very dead remnants of what must have once been a sprawling and spectacular reef. Which explained why my anchor chain was rattling like Marley’s ghost as it moved across the seafloor as LG swung with the wind.
Most of St. John is a national park, and there are many pretty spots, which perfectly suit my taste for solitude and natural beauty. But I had better choose carefully. The trades will be mostly blasting for the next two weeks, so finding the right protection will be the difference between nervous watchfulness and relaxed enjoyment. It’s a thin line.
Anthropocene Notes:
2024 Emissions: I had time to total up some of the figures for life aboard Laughing Gull in 2024. We sailed about 5000 miles, and consumed 457 gallons of diesel. That means my transportation and utilities for the year came to 4.9 metric tons (MT) of CO2e (CO2 Equivalent, which also factors in other greenhouse gases emitted).
That is more than I expected, or hoped for. For context it is just a little less CO2e than the average American driver emits annually. So living on LG is like owning and driving a gas car that gets 24 mpg, except it also includes my utilities (electricity, water production, water heating, and heating/AC, though I rarely use that last one).
If I add in the annual emissions from my mostly vegan diet of approximately 2 MTs CO2e (a vegetarian would be 2.7 MT, and an omnivore 3.6 MTs), plus my airplane flights (approximately 6 MT), my 2024 emissions are 13-15 MTs of CO2e. Let’s make it 15MT, to include spending and purchases (ie consumption, which is limited by lack of storage space and a ruthless utilitarianism).
That doesn’t feel like much progress. Though I suppose I can comfort myself by noting that the per capita emissions of most Americans with a similar socio-economic status are two to three times greater than mine.
But the physics of the planet doesn’t care about that sort of relativism. What I can’t do—what none of us can do—is escape the very stark reality that to limit global warming to 2C (which is about .5C higher than we are already experiencing, and will have a lot of unpredictable impacts beyond the sorts of climate-driven disasters which are increasingly frequent), the global per capita annual average will have to drop from its current 4.7MT to 2.1-2.5MT by 2030. Which means humanity will have to cut its emissions by up to 55% in the next half decade.
Wealthier global humans (ie most of developed world population), with our relatively large emissions, will have to cut a lot more if we don’t want to be using up more than our fair share of the global carbon budget. For example, for me to get from 15MT down to the targeted per capita level of 2.1 MT, I would have have to cut my annual emissions 86% by 2030. Even though I could knock 40% off my footprint by staying off of airplanes, that sort of drastic reduction is going to require a lot of help from technology, leading to the rapid decarbonization of global industries from food production to transport.
On a more local level, I’ll have to decarbonize Laughing Gull, because my current diesel consumption alone puts me at more than twice the global per capita emissions target for 2030. That means getting rid of her diesel engine and generator. Nuclear fusion can’t come soon enough. Or perhaps I can adapt a Flux Capacitor. Failing those, more solar and an electric engine is the obvious step. Electric propulsion efficiency and range is advancing rapidly, and is a good example of how solutions exist. They just need to be implemented.
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Great trip!