May 15, 2008 - A Silent Tsunami: The Skyrocketing Cost of Cruising
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

The cost of living is spiraling upwards. In his book Blood and Oil published in 2004, the author Michael Klare forecast an oil price rise above $30 a barrel, a huge underestimation. No longer can cruisers - any more than Earth People - live easily on the smell of an oily rag. One thing we can do is try to adjust our way of life as best we can to accommodate frequent appalling price hikes.

When we were warned that the price of oil might soar to the unheard of level of $90 a barrel, we decided we would top up our fuel tanks - though the price per liter of diesel had gone from $1.10 a liter, which we found high a year ago when last we took on diesel, to $1.40 a liter. "It will be like money in the bank", Michel assured me as the precious fluid gushed in. Over $900 dollars later we had topped up our reservoirs. A month later we noted that the price per liter was $1.60, and the price per barrel was well over $110 US dollars and rising, though not nearly keeping pace with the major oil companies' massive profits. Outboard and generator gasoline is going out of sight also. We will try to make our latest infusion of fuels last.

Some incandescent bulbs no longer being used.

What can we do to stretch them?. We had begun life aboard with incandescent light bulbs, several of which had already been replaced by a few less demanding halogen lamps and an Alpenglow cabin light with its compact fluorescent bulb, even less voracious at 9 Watts. Michel decided to transform another of our cabin light fixtures with Alpenglow entrails in order to get rid of yet another 30 Watt bulb. (See www.alpenglowlights.com.) However, following upon a certain amount of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, he admitted that he might have been smarter to buy a second Alpenglow lighting fixture instead of just a ballast and bulb.

Our Alpenglow fluorescent light fixture.

Our old home-built light fixture getting Alpenglow fluorescent entrails

For super savings, why not try LEDs? Two Watts instead of 20 or 25 is a mighty difference. We began by ordering LED lights for reading to replace some more of our remaining power-hungry 12 volt incandescent bulbs. The reading lights are used for many hours aboard Magic Dragon during winter evenings. "Super-bright LEDs" was the promise online. We had some shipped out, both narrow and wide angle light diffusion to try out and compare.

LED 12 volt Edison screw type socket bulbs - wide and narrow light diffusion.

I soon decided that Super Dim LEDs is closer to the truth. Nevertheless, we have learned to live with them, realizing that as long as we adjust the narrow loom of light to land on our books, they are indeed excellent. I soon came to prefer reading in our bunk by the loom of my LED reading light compared to that of the incandescent bulb. However, for general lighting purposes, the ones we bought are inadequate, while our Alpenglow lights are just great.

Michel reading with one of our new LED lights directed onto his magazine.

Learning to wear more clothes and use the cabin heater less is another of our fuel-saving ploys. Now that we no longer sail to tropical climes for the southern winter, we are trying with some success to live without our diesel heater for a longer period of the year. My secret weapon is the 'Spencer', a soft, light, long sleeved under-garment, very warm for its feather weight. Michel's is a Canadian Winter Olympics woolen ski helmet - a present from visiting Canucks - for use in the evenings to keep his balding cranium warm while reading, emailing or Googling. Let's face it, we are wimps. Kiwis go year-round wearing shorts and short sleeved shirts. Some children - and adults - go barefoot throughout the admittedly mild Northland winter. We have known several Kiwis who boast of never having heated their houses all winter long. We value our comfort too much to even think of it.

Michel's secret weapon, a Hudson Bay Company ski helmet.

We have always used LPG for refrigeration, showering, and cooking. It too is now spiraling in price. We filled one of our two forty pound (18 kilo) LPG tanks in March for $42.50, double what we had paid a year earlier. Yet a month later a refill had soared to $52.94. We expect it to go even higher. This morning we lit our diesel heater to take off the damp after three warm northerly days of mist, fog and heavy rains. While we were at it I harnessed its heat to cook beans and 'corned silver side' as corned beef is called hereabouts - a cheaper way of doing it than simmering it on the galley stove with costly LPG. Whenever the kettle comes to the boil on the heater we transfer the water into thermos bottles and refill the kettle so we have hot water when we need it. When alight, our heater is usually either heating a kettle or simmering a stew, soup or whatever is going, for instance making toast or roasting chestnuts.

It has been years since we used our oven for baking, instead baking bread, muffins and cakes on top of the stove on a tiny flame rather than in the gas hungry oven, a practice that we started years ago while cruising in the tropics where the heat of an oven was not welcome. Nowadays only roast meals get the oven treatment when I can heap spuds, kumara and garlic around to make it really worthwhile. As for making our own jams and jellies, I realized ages ago that it was cheaper to buy than to start from scratch, and far less work. Homemade jams and jellies are sold in some Op Shops, as Thrift Shops are called Down Under, so we do not have to have suffer the sometimes ersatz taste of store bought jam.

We have become more finicky about orienting our solar panel toward the sun's rays, setting a timer to remind us if there is much danger of forgetting. At anchor, however, with the changes of tide and wind direction, it is smarter to leave the solar panel horizontal, otherwise we may discover it has turned its back to the sun.

Our solar panel oriented to catch the rays of the rising sun.

The cost of food too is skyrocketing here, as it is elsewhere in the world. Another saving is to remember to drag a fishing line. We affix a cowbell to alert us when a fish strikes. We just came back onto our river pilings after another spell out and about having feasted on oysters, pipis, cockles, and kahawai, a fish easily caught that makes wonderful sashimi among other things. It is a game we play, great fun too.

Now that we can surf the Internet on board with our Vodem and now that we have a more amp hungry laptop, in overcast weather we had begun harnessing our gasoline generator, Power Chief, more frequently and for longer periods to top up our battery. The hope is that with our power saving strategies we will run our generator for a shorter time and less frequently than before.

There was a time when Magic Dragon was able to motor along at 7 knots for some 15 cents per hour after we had filled our tanks with fuel at 9 cents a gallon in Manzanillo on our way back to BC from the Caribbean in 1970. At that time, in Canada and the US, diesel was only slowly climbing past the 20 cent a gallon mark. Now at today's prices we have to reckon on $4.80 an hour to maintain our economy 6 knots speed, about double what it was less than two years ago.

Of course, the natural thing to do is to sail wherever we go rather than power. However since the wind likes to blow from our destination and the battery usually can do with a topping up, we often choose to power at maximum efficiency unless sailing conditions are irresistible. At 78 and 75 we are not what we once were. We are aware that our small adjustments are nothing compared to those made by others in the rest of the world, where millions of people, no longer able to afford the price of bare necessities, face starvation. We are extremely thankful to be who we are, where we are, in these scary times.

Living on earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year!