The Aug. 7 video by Time Magazine's Bryan Walsh is the best one I've seen on global sail transport trends. As it is only a bit over 5 minutes, you can get brought up to speed and sense the excitement that is spreading. Time's coverage centers on Fair Transport's Tres Hombres schooner-brig and the group's plans for a four masted ecoliner to be four times as long as the 32-meter Tres Hombres.
Featured at the helm is Austrian Andreas Lackner, one of the Tres Hombres captains -- there are three total, the other two Dutch -- hence the name of the ship. Captured on video is the spirit of fun and working together that cannot happen on a huge cargo ship belching high-sulfur bunker fuel.
I was fortunate to see the story online fast enough to be the first one to post a comment:
Fantastic! Brings back beautiful memories of my two voyages on the Tres Hombres. A fabulous sail transport player is Guillaume Le Grand's TOWT organization, and a major ecoliner developer is the UK's B9 shipping. Get ready to take your bicycle and bike trailer to the docks to meet your ship and take on truly green products. Or at least think about that coffee and chocolate you love that's transported thousands of miles with dirty bunker fuel. Now that the average speed of the big cargo ships has dropped to 15 knots -- slower than the clipper ships of over a century ago -- due to high oil prices, sail transport clearly looks like the future right around the next cape. The ships may be engineless like the Tres Hombres or aided by renewable-energy auxiliary motors. The Sail Transport Network has been promoting clean, renewable-energy transport for trade and travel since 1999, and thanks to expensive, dwindling oil and the far worse threat of global warming, and our love of the sea, the sail transport movement is on the rise.Read the brief article and comments by sail transport heroes Heinz Otto and Gavin Allwright, and see the video at science.time.com.
See inspiring pictures of a recent voyage (and offloading) of the Tres Hombres to Amsterdam where it delivered rum and chocolate to a hoard of bicycle-trailer merchant innovators, at Holland's Sail Transport Success Today.
Join the Sail Transport Network in any supportive capacity -- there is a gratis membership category as well -- at Sail Transport Network's "trade association" structure, and get our burgee to fly from your rigging or tack up on your bulkhead!
Keep abreast of major and small sail transport developments by joining the STN list serve and follow the Facebook STN page.
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Further reading and viewing:
The Web Log of the Tres Hombres : Sailing 18,500 bottles of biodynamic wine, delivered to Copenhagen and Vejroe, Denmark this month. Enjoy vicariously the gastronomical adventure at Vejro island, by crew member Dymphna who contributed to Logbook Tres Hombres which is written in Dutch, English and German.
Visit the homepage of Fair Transport: fairtransport.homestead.com
