I don’t know if you’ve noticed, butduring the past few months oil prices have ramped up to levels which,as the financial crisis of 2008 had demonstrated, tend to crash theglobal economy. Even the International Energy Agency has recentlypicked up on this fact and sounded an alarm. That was before Libyaexploded, taking a couple of millions of barrels a day ofirreplaceable light sweet crude off the market. That was also beforeJapan was devastated by a major earthquake and tsunami, damaging oilrefineries and nuclear power plants. (Tokyo immediately startedasking Moscow to start shipping more oil and coal right away.) Nobodyknows how many other disruptions such as these are going to occurthis year, but that number is probably greater than zero, and itwon’t take too many more to cause the global petrochemical supplychain to snap, resulting in high prices, shortages and rationing.

Desperate times call for desperatemeasures, and so I decided to pre-purchase all the gasoline we willneed for the entire year. I put my two 20-liter jerricans on the dockcart, and wheeled them out of the marina, across the parking lot,down the street, through the pretty little gas-lit park that theBoston Freedom Trail passes through on the way to the Bunker HillMonument, and to the filling station on the corner. I had to do thistrip three times; the first two loads I emptied into the on-boardtank, filling it. The remaining load will stay in the jerricans, ondeck, shown above.

Sixty liters is a truly astoundingamount of energy. At 9.7 kW·h/L,it’s almost 600 kW·h. Rowing flat out, I can put out about 70 Watts,and so the energy I got from the gas station is equivalent to merowing continuously for an entire year, or about five years of merowing for five hours every day. Not only that, but at around US$1/Lit is about the cheapest liquid available—cheaper than milk orbottled water or apple cider, none of which get you very far. Notonly that, but this amazing substance is conveniently dispensedaround the clock by a computerized machine at a clean, brightly litfacility that is within easy walking distance. It just sounds toogood to be true; I don’t think it will last.

We don’t usegasoline all that much. We have a 10-horsepower outboard that sits inan inboard-outboard well under the transom and behaves much as aninboard engine would without the associated oil in the bilge, thediesel stink, the bother of seasonal commissioning/decomissioning orthe expense. We use it to motor out of the marina and, sometimes,partway out of the harbor, and back. We sometimes motor slowly whenbecalmed, to maintain course and to avoid the unpleasantness of“lying ahull”—where the boat turns sideways to the swell and isrocked by it. And then there is Cape Hatteras, an evil place that,when heading south, is best circumvented by motoring down canals.Even if we sail Abemarle and Pamlico Sounds, we still have to motordown canals from Norfolk, Virginia to reach Abemarle Sound, and thenagain from Pamlico Sound to Beaufort, North Carolina.

This is why Idecided to avoid running into any global geopolitical complicationswith the petroleum supply and stock up while things are stillreasonable. I don’t know that this was strictly necessary, but now mymind is at ease because we’ll have enough gasoline for at least ayear, maybe even two or three if we time the tides better, motorslowly when we do have to motor, and don’t waste fuel motoring whenwe can just bob around until the wind picks up again. During thesetwo years I might weld together a digester and start running theengine on gas produced from driftwood we can pick up along the beach.

And now the reallycheerful part: thanks to all of these global petrochemicaldifficulties, there will be few, if any, large obnoxious motor boatson the water this season, just as there weren’t in 2008, and the fewthat remain will move very slowly, to conserve fuel—too slowly toproduce large annoying wakes. And that is certainly something to lookforward to.