Sustainable boats

Hmmm, two Piper Cubs? There's a thought!

 

Honestly, I didn't go looking for this. I was reading the pontoon boat sailing conversion thread, and I thought I had seen a plans for a 14' pontoon boat for sailing or motoring in Popular Mechanics back in the 1960's. I tried Googling, and found nothing, so I went issue by issue for the 60's and 70's looking for it. No joy, but I found this.

 

epoxy. s/s, ali
whats green about these

 

Hmm. You sound like a hippy. Do you have any pictures of your boat? She sounds like a beaut'..

 

After getting disgruntled here, I joined the iboats forum and found them to be very helpful. Barely any cynical naysayers making me feel stupid at all.. It's been raining like a ******* here in L.A for a spell, and now that it's nice again, I'm having a guy come out to do a compression test on the 351 windsor and I'm going to drill into the transom and stringers to look for rot.. She seems sound, no soft spots.. What do you people think about modifying fibreglass hulls to be used as hot tubs?

 

its not finished yet

 

Older ones with nearly bullet proof single skin hulls, perhaps. Some of the newer, foam core stuff doesn't seem to wear as well. Once one of the skins breaks free of the core, you have major problems. The weakened panel flexes, causing the GRP to crack, letting in more water to create more skin/core separation. This can make repairing it an expensive uncertain proposition, often leaving you with a useless mess. Fiberglas seems to prefer heavier scantlings.

It seems the further we get from work boat lines to racing lines, the more short lived the hulls become, no matter what material they are made of.

Perhaps the most eco friendly thing to do is to design and build a boat whose construction, aesthetics, and utility can stand the test of time.

 

Yes. But - will we ever be satisfied with anything less than the fastest we can build? It seems to me that Necessity is the Mother... when we cannot build out of toxins/landfill-waiting-to-happen, we will be forced to explore other options - renewable/compostible whatever. Maybe it will be a case of fast boats that last one season, then get spread on the veges, and slow boats that last forever, and not much in between?

 

Just a heads-up for anyone seriously interested in this subject:

I'm the book reviewer for Living Aboard magazine, and Sheridan House sent me a copy of Dieter Loibner new book, Sustainable Sailing. I'll probably review it soon, because Dieter is an excellent writer (I recently reviewed his Folkboat book-- great stuff, if you want to know a lot about the evolution of this fine little yacht and its various descendants.)

The cover of Sustainable Sailing is a shot from the masthead of a large and luxurious yacht, anchored in beautiful turquoise water. Up at the top of the shot is a tiny wooden proa with a single low-tech sail, sailing past happily.

This is probably a good comment on the future of sailing.

If I had to guess, most of us do much of our sailing in daysails or short cruises that we could easily make in boats much smaller and simpler than the boats we actually own. It's a cliche, but there's a lot of truth in the idea that the amount of fun we can have in sailboats is inversely proportional to the size of the boat.

Unless you're planning a world cruise, your sailing needs could probably be served by a cheap little boat that doesn't take a lot of resources to produce, even if it's of some nonrenewable material, like plastic. For example, I'd love to have a Farrier tri. But for the energy and resources cost of one such big tri, you could probably build a dozen or more rotomolded Windriders, with which a lot more sailors could have a good time.

Anyway, what I guess I'm saying is that in practical terms, small, simple, and cheap is probably a more productive way to go, at least for many of us, than figuring out how to do big, complex, and expensive with more green-friendly materials.

 

I think the whole enviro thing is a bit wacked relative to multis. Around here when we get a bad storm you can ride the train along the few miles it parallels lake Ontario and see trees washed out into the drink as far as the eye can see. Enough wood (Ok probably mostly hardwoods) to make boats for all of us for the rest of our lives.

Almost all the local houses have big softwood decks tagged on. Each one woould provide more than enough wood for a medium tri.

Housebuilder larry haun did a piece in FHB about how to build a mahogany shed in the US out of the mahoganny they delivered the mahogany ply in. Nice clean mahogany/luan boards. Sure there is a disaster upstream somewhere and possibly from beatles here, but that isn't any reason to stuff the material in a landfill. There is so much wood it isn't going out of style any time soon. I know of many rivers that are stuffed with sunken logs that can be harvested any time. And anyway, there are trees to all horizons when flying around here, so cutting a few of them is no big deal.

At our farm, you can see the shoreline in this vid, most of the trees early in the vid there are ours going back half a mile, lots of softwood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnLmKXY-FCg

Of course just buying the stuff in local stores that sell plywood is a lot easier. Boats are at the pinacle of our desires, I don't see any reason to hold back on them when so much beautiful wood is wasted on advertising circulars and diapers every day.

 

Ray I'm with you on the small boats, but really it's because I think small anyway where material stuff is concerned.

The thing about the enviro blackmail is it seeks to slam the lid equally on all of us. So jim clark takes a haircut on his super yacht, and I am supposed to feel bad about the six sheets of ply in the main hull of my tri's skin. Not happening, if I wanted a 50 footer I would just build it fully confident that I was finding a higher use for all that material.

Speaking of which, my shed has probably 30 sheets of OSB in the wall sheething alone. The fence in the back yard is probaby 200 1x6 x 6' softwood boards all here when I moved in. The house is just a small suburban unit about 900 square feet, with a shop about the same size. Not feeling the least bit motivated about saving wood (or anything else) in my boats. Though the footprint of the place does limit the number I can afford to keep on hand, severely.

 

Some very good points.

To me, a sustainable wooden boat should last long enough for the trees cut down to make it to grow back.

Boats made of cheaper, faster growing wood would not be expected to last as long as ones made from the slower growing good stuff.

If I ever build a boat, I will expect it to last at least 20 years. And if I can't imagine it being useful to me that long, I probably shouldn't be building it.

I think of a boat as I do a pet. A long term commitment.

 

Sharpii, I have some female friends who would quite like to meet you...

ThomD, I love the idea of the house built from the packing material!

However, while there may be lots of remaining forest around you - and that's great! - but in the rainforests of Indo and Malaysia it is a different story, and that's where a lot of our timber comes from. I don't know so much about Canadian forestry, but in rainforests, and in the native forests of Australia, you can see a lot of green but be looking at a very degraded forest. Unfortunately in Indo especially, you just see burnt hillsides after the timber pirates have been through.

Forests are not just collections of trees. Plantations are ok, but they are not life-batteries - they are monocultures. The very seedstock they use must be maintained in a native forest with the full range of biodiversity, otherwise it degrades in quality over generations. Natural forests keep thinning out the weaker genestock.

Apart from that, biodiversity is worth maintaining for its own sake, and for a hundred other sakes that benefit the human race.

 

Just discovered somebody is trying something adventurous with bamboo. This may work for the cross beams on a cat or tri...
http://www.thegreenpages.com.au/new...Razor Email Campaign&utm_term=bamboo bicycles