Click here for previous posts on SAILing cargo. You may recall the vessel Ceres, which moved cargo from Vermont to NYC two years ago and which this summer suspended those efforts.
The sailing vessel below–credit to Stefan Edick– is the venerable schooner Adventure. Built in 1926 in Essex MA, she doryfished for three decades before times forced several re-invention. Recently, she got back into moving food, transporting $70,000 of Maine farm and sea bounty from Commercial Wharf in Portland to Boston’s Long Wharf.
Here she passes Spring Point Ledge Light, with Fort Gorges in the distance. All the photos that follow are used with credit to Mark Hartman via Jessica Suda.
She’s prepared for the cargo and
loaded.
Here’s Adventure arrived in Boston, where
Metro Pedal Power takes over to move the goods to market.
Click here for the Maine Sail Freight Flickr page.
tugster: a waterblog 
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September 9, 2015 at 4:21 pm
JED!
WHERE have they succeeded in that VSP did not?
Did they learn active lessons from VSP and were able to combat the same issues BEFORE they became issues or at least insurmountable?
Did it boil down to more money on hand?
September 9, 2015 at 7:50 pm
tugster
good questions. i hope they generate answers.
September 13, 2015 at 8:56 am
bowsprite
so far: cargo via sail appearing on a dock = a successful publicity event.
It has been ‘achieved successfully’ by the Dept of Agriculture’s in Highland’s early attempts to carry cargo by water using the Pennsylvania Railroad 399 (also had to rely on trucks because it was cheaper) perhaps 15 (?) years ago.
VSF ‘successfully’ carried cargo downriver two years in a row, from where Maine Sail was much inspired. They were. They are not gracious about giving credit where credit is due, but we all know.
Here, then, is to more successful ‘events’. Success will be more vessels carrying goods, more on the water and off the smog-choked tired clogged roads, tunnels and bridges. Trucking looks cheaper, but in the long run, it is not.
September 10, 2015 at 12:48 pm
anon
One big difference was the waters they were sailing. Lake Champlain -its great to sail above Crown Point but below and in the Champlain Canal you have to motor and it is slow. Same with some of the Hudson.
September 10, 2015 at 12:53 pm
tugster
anon– absolutely. the coast of Maine has deepwater and great wind and large population centers . . .
September 11, 2015 at 8:18 pm
Vermont Rice
Vermont Sail Freight here. Greenhorns, the organization responsible for Maine Sail Freight, was in fact involved in Vermont Sail Freight in 2013. So no doubt they learned something. Hard to rate the success or failure of the respective projects in any kind of objective terms. Really, in the end, the method of transportation, how fast it goes, how long it takes, whether you motor or sail, is really not very relevant.
It comes down to sales, can you buy low and sell high and do so with enough volume to cover not just the buying and selling labor but the boat and crewing work too. If you can easily make lots of good sales then the voyage is a success. If you can’t, then it’s a bust, no matter how big the hold or how beautiful the sailing was. I really don’t know how the Greenhorns did with this — I don’t communicate with them anymore, not on the best terms — but the outcome will really come down to not whether they orchestrated the sailing of cargo to Boston but whether they sold it all at the prices they needed to.
Vermont Sail Freight’s 2013 trip was widely heralded as a success but after the media coverage was more than a few days old we found it really hard to sell our cargo, because existing distributors have that scene all tied up. Not so easy for a maverick venture to suddenly appear on any scene, even a populous and affluent one, and liquidate tonnage for retail prices. So several tons of that first delivery remained unsold, on the dock, in Brooklyn. Eventually I came with my van and took the cargo back to Vermont and put it in my basement, where much of it remains to this day.
Herein lies the problem with trying to reinvent something from the ashes out of loyalty to the spirit of the thing. Until the general public really need the service, because it’s the best thing going, maybe the only thing going, it’s really hard to have to convince every buyer every day that you deserve a dollar more because you did it with a sailboat!
The marketing and promotion arm needs to be relentless, and keep working and winning sales even after the media frenzy is long gone. Greenhorns is good at that game generally, but they rely mostly on unpaid volunteers who lack the stamina to keep coming to work week in and week out, working at a repetitive and endless assignment. Maybe it’s sad, but you need really good salesmen more than you need good sailors to make cargo sailing into a business.
September 13, 2015 at 9:05 am
bowsprite
Yes, if it is a business, you need businesspeople.
If it will be a necessity, and you will be subsidized, or part of federal program to delivery food, you should be ready.
If the next storm blows out the tunnels, the bridges fall, the roads are blocked, fuel is too scarce, a city that does not grow enough to feed itself will be knocking on your door.
so, be ready, VSF. But maybe by then, the last thing you want to do is venture into NY/NJ Harbor to bring food to a desperate, starving city too stupid to support you before it mattered.
September 14, 2015 at 7:09 pm
Vermont Rice
In the end being wrong and being right too soon amount to much the same thing!
Dmitry Orlov told me at the outset it couldn’t be done, that I shouldn’t bother. The system will either ignore it or kill it outright. Well, that’s a russian viewpoint, to be sure.
I don’t regret doing VSF and would take ship again for NYC or elsewhere if the conditions were right. I do love the work. But I don’t particularly love NYC, although I will say that I dislike NYC less than I did before taking on the project! Upstate antipathy to “The City” runs deep, what can I say…
As for Ceres, it’s possible she’ll be heading for the gulf of mexico to move cargo there, like a texas scow schooner. Moved down there possibly by rail.
September 14, 2015 at 7:43 pm
tugster
thanks all for the thoughtful thinkings-aloud. i’m hoping to hear followup analysis from the MSF run.
September 15, 2015 at 8:00 am
Vermont Rice
Me too. It’s hard to get past the cloud of high-minded rhetoric on Greenhorns page and get substantive news, though. I did note that there was a last-minute change of vessel? What happened to the Harvey Gammage, that was being announced as the MSF vessel by the press just a couple weeks before the trip?