Mary Rothschild has this item at Sail-World.com:
There are small signs the world over. Over in Europe there’s a sailor who is delivering wine by sailing boat, down in the Gulf of Mexico another attempt to convey goods by sailing boat came to a sad end when the boat sank, but now in USA’s Puget Sound there’s a sailor who has a weekly food order – to be delivered by sailing boat and without using a drop of oil.
It was last January when Scottish engineer Dave Reid, who gave up his job to begin his ‘Sail Transport Network’, loaded some 700 pounds of freshly harvested organic vegetables into the cabin of his 27-foot sailboat, The Whisper, in Sequim Bay, hoisted his sails and rode an outgoing tide into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, bound for Seattle.
Over the next two days, Reid sailed on quirky winds, dodged state ferries, scooted past Chinese container ships and even encountered a mammoth Trident submarine before eventually docking at Shilshole Bay. That’s where his customers showed up to collect their allotments of herbs and greens.
Cargo bikes are used to get the produce to the boat - .. .
In an economy that usually rewards speed and efficiency, Reid’s carbon-free voyage gave new meaning to tilting at windmills. It took 36 hours to make a trip a small truck could have accomplished in two hours. And his 700 pounds amounted to a minuscule percentage of the food consumed in Seattle that day.
But Reid and his collaborators in the regional sustainability movement are dead serious about the idea of transporting goods by sailboat. It’s an idea that’s less about straight-from-the-farm spinach and arugula than it is about proving that just about anything can be moved from Point A to Point B without burning a drop of oil.
To make that work on a larger scale, he says, the effort must start small. Instead of waiting for President Obama or the Ford Motor Co. to conserve energy, he’s taking action now, riding on the belief that individuals and neighborhoods must take matters into their own hands.
