Catamarans and personal sovereignty. The Roaring 20's. Upmarket Refugees.

 Been thinking about this for a couple of years.

This decade will be one of systemic collapse and  climate refugees. [The Roaring Twenties]

On one hand you've got your cabin in the woods. Will the woods burn? Will you have to evacuate and if so where too? How do you defend your personal fiefdom from roving speculators? How does the movie end making a last stand on shifting sand?

Bollocks. You need a platform that provides flexibility. you need a platform that creates it's own water supply, you need a platform that you can transport via free energy towards hope rather than pretending TV tropes are based in reality.

 Catamarans, ocean going Catamarans seem to be the most elastic way to cope over the next decade.

Single hulls are cheaper and more versatile, granted, but they take more talent to sail and importantly they don't provide the storage of a multi-hull.

When all you own is an object you can steer around the globe with a crew of two space is critical. Think of a Catamaran as a mothership.

The clunkiness of a Catamaran also limits your choices and simplifies the plans you need to make.

You have a watermaker, that changes salt water to fresh, you have solar panels that provide power, you have a small wind generator that does the same and when the wind is pushing you through the water and your idle propellers are turning in the current that is a third source of generated power.

You have the ability to cross oceans relatively quickly, The quicker the safer. 

You have, even on a 40-50ft boat, more usable real estate, comfortable accom for 8 with 4 cabins and indoor/outdoor living areas.

There's an element of personal sovereignty that may be an illusion but as long as it lasts it's real and valuable. The fact that you possess a loaded wagon on a liquid prairie, self quarantined in a world shortly full of desperate people staggering blindly away from calamity at the very least puts you in the upmarket refugee category. The free international transport your vehicle provides is also itself non trivial.

 So many considerations, the faster [more narrow] your boat the less space you have but your ability to outrun other vehicles is an important defense. Counter to that is that with modern communication small networks of seafarers have already formed and are their own multi-national tribes and that sort of politics is going to matter. Along with the advantages of autonomy there are also networks with skills and resource sharing.

The sailing learning curve is less steep with multi-hulls. They have less flexibility but if you are capable of sailing downwind across oceans and then sheltering around coasts and pottering about in your seabourne apartment the skill set you need to do that is rapidly learnable. You may also want to consider retaining a Skipper to aid the transition, start looking sooner rather than later.

It's dangerous though, there are many simple mistakes that could ruin you and lots of moving parts any one of which could break and test your improvisational skills. Layered contingencies will become a new required language.

Life would consist of learning new skills on a daily basis and that's healthier than dooming it in a basement. 

You are going to need a million dollars roughly. Give or take half a million. I'm picking that as an average. With luck you could get it done for 400-000, I'm not going to bicker about entry levels. I'm addressing those who see the 20's as a period of massive upheaval and can throw liquidity at the problem rather than sit waiting to be overwhelmed. 

The Catamaran market has quietly exploded the last few years, new evolved designs have emerged to cater to a rising group of adventurous Mom and Pop empty nesters who want to circumnavigate as a retirement plan.

Easy to operate, creature comfort yachts with built in redundancies, washer/dryers, water catchment systems and network based repair options are now common.

The best of which have high demand and waiting lists. 

One example is the Seawind 1370 which has a two year waiting list at present.

It's the best example of an neo-upper middle class performance cruiser

https://www.seawindcats.com/seawind-1370/

It's a dream boat but demand being what it is it's more or less unavailable. Good stepping off point though.

Although if you are in the market for the best money can buy here's something to drool over.

Your crew sails it for you, it travels above the waves with no pitch or roll and you get to bask in the collective hate of humanity as you watch the world end in style.

 

 

There's a gamut of yachts, more available and all round the million dollar mark. You can buy second hand charters and refit them, bringing the cost back up from your initial saving to around a million or you can buy a fully fitted new yacht.  

Here's some comparative fairly data rich cat-porn

 

These are upper middle boats. I say this because there's a small class of performance cruisers that are multi million dollar [10/11 million]

The best example of which is the Gunboat. Very light, very very fast, very luxurious.

 

Very few people will get near you if you don't want them to

 Ok Ok, that's enough of that, back to the real world people! Chop chop! Half of us will be dead in the next decade and the small but dedicated community of international catamaran and single hull western upmarket refugees presently enjoying the shelter of Fiji after the mandatory 2 weeks isolation there while they wait for the cyclone season to end and NZ to relax it's inbound restrictions for certified disease free sailors [americas cup coming up in March].....nothing to see here......unless you have some liquidity and are looking at elastic forms of out of the box insurance.

 

Musing on potential for NZ community arts using aspects of Australian models.

 

 

 

[Photo Roberto Di Lernia]

 

We here in New Zealand have a growing responsibility to acknowledge and reflect not only our own potential to exist as a functioning cultural unit but additionally we have a kind of global eye of Mordor fixed upon us as the bruised globe fixates upon us seeking hope in times of progressive cross spectrum degradation.

Who needs it?

Well we do, we can congregate without danger and the onus is on us to fill a gap that imported culture, which as been eradicated has left us and more importantly find ways to express ourselves in artful and uplifting ways. Because life will continue to be hard and it helps when people gather and celebrate themselves.

We are lucky culturally to have a sibling that’s always been slightly more evolved, bigger, more casually cosmopolitan to learn from.

Australia is our friend.

We are stoic, small, used to understated passive aggressive stealth sarcasm as our only weapon of mass destruction. We are creative and imaginative yet also quietly yet dangerously self critical.

We have the Beehive, Australia has the Sydney Opera House. We had Flying Nun, they have 'Triple J’, we had advance NZ, they had indigenous genocide. But I jest…

Australia been our big brother forever but it might be time to recognise that neither of us are teenagers any more.

Australias dedication to the showcasing of the Arts and specifically the efforts made to integrate art throughout its far flung communities is something we might have a squiz at and learn from. We might do well to look at the cohesive models they employ and focus on generating similar projects using the latent talent we have with our own creatives as well as nurturing creative talent for the future not least because in a world of collapsing social, economic, environmental and political systems a sense of fun and finely tuned whimsy may help us maintain our collective sanities and endure cascading collective disappointments that might otherwise collapse us as they are quite self evidently collapsing other countries less fortunate.

I’m a clown prone to flights of fancy and not in fact an omnipotent social engineer so instead I’ll stick to recollections and let the more qualified prospect for applicable resonance.

There's a small town in Western Australia called Kellerberrin, it has a population of 868 last anybody checked, its chosen byline is ‘Kellerberrin…Where life is as rich as the landscape.’

 It’s 205 kilometres (127 mi) east of Perth [Itself one of the most isolated cities in the world] on the Great Eastern Highway.

Kellerberrin is about as much in the middle of nowhere as it’s possible to be. Yet due to the efforts in general of a progressive and muscular Arts council it and many other far communities have vibrant expressive little pockets within them. 

Over two decades ago I took a small part in the opening of an arts exhibition in Kellerberrin and it really opened my eyes to how enthusiastically rural farm folk can digest and discover and play with art and whimsy. It laid bare my hoity-toity pretentions.

The opening, in this small rural agricultural outpost was of work by Umberto Cavenago, an Italian conceptual artist who had been imported for six months as an artist in residence.

He was a small man who wore silk suits and didn’t speak much English.

The opening itself was the culmination of the mysterious efforts he’d been putting in the preceding months. As with any small close knit community the local grapevine was a robust and pre-internet information highway unto itself and he had given them much to chatter about. He was harmless and seemingly incongruous but this is a culture where yahoos, larrikins  and misfits are generally accepted and sometimes celebrated and apparently this guy was a high level eccentric and part of Australias charm is that at quite a deep level there’s really nothing wrong with that.

One story concerning him was that on a long straight road slicing through the wheatbelt he was  sightseeing, driving his rental on the wrong side of the road because in Italy that was his reality, they drove on that side, when in the far distance a local farmer approached driving the other way. As the vehicles approached over an extended distance they slowed, each sticking to their guns, until they almost touched at which point they stopped and the silk suited Italian conceptual artist and the wheat farmer on his way home got out and in basic English tried to work out what was happening. Eventually they worked it out, laughed and order was restored and the beginnings of an eccentric legend was added to the local folklore.

Umberto Cavenago spent a great deal of time walking throughout the town with large bags of grass seed, sewing them on the well packed dirt of the pavements. He would nod cheerfully at passers by and pretend he knew no English at all so he didn’t have to explain himself. This improved the quality of the local scuttlebutt considerably. 

Later he went through a list of local people and set up a video camera face onto them and asked them questions I confess I can no longer remember, recorded the answers and disappeared back into the local Gallery which he’d been provided.

Scuttlebutt intensified.

Still later the grass that he’d sown took root on the pavements and he went round taking painstaking record of that in its entirety.

It all culminated in an art exhibition in which myself and a small group of creatives travelled from Perth to embroider on the evening of the opening.

I’m writing this in Oct 2020 from recollections of the actual event back in 98/99 so apologise I can’t remember specifically the colourful crew. I do remember Marcus Canning had a large inflatable costume and the hot gusty winds that were blasting across the plains on which Kellerberrin resides were so strong that if he had been swept off his feet it would have been miles before they touched earth again. He survived.

Inside the gallery which was two main rooms were the answers to all the strange behaviours. Umberto Cavenago had sown the seeds to have them grow and then his photography was him recording the tracks locals had made through them as they walked the footpaths of their small town. He had then used that data to painstakingly render a scaled down model of the matrix of footpaths in the town in dirt with grass and replicated the paths worn down outside in replicate in his model.

Heady stuff, but not hard to understand.

The other room contained banks of video monitors facing each other from across the room each with looped footage of local answering questions to camera.

The locals were cheerfully milling about inside and taking it all in. It was after all a very interesting interpretation of their community on a couple of different levels. There were the tracks they made through the town and there in the other room were recordings of their local kinsfolk answering questions.

The local agricultural and produce association chairman got up to deliver a speech. He welcomed everybody and thanked Umberto Cavenago for his work and then went on to explain art to weather beaten isolated folk in a really inclusive and homespun and to me quite glorious way. 

 

He said art was an excuse for people to get together and celebrate their communities. He said you didn’t have to understand it and perhaps part of it’s value was not understanding it gave people something to discuss and that itself was interesting. He said it gave people shared experiences and in a community of hardworking folk that perhaps didn’t get out much shared experiences were gifts. He said that this particular art was reflective of this specific community and that he and the people he represented were grateful to Umberto Cavenago for the unique perspective he’d brought to them From all the way on the other side of the world.

There was applause and then with a certain newfound collective pride after so good a speech the local people milled around the exhibition making conversation til the event concluded.

This tiny town and it’s adoption and celebration of an obscure Italian conceptual artist really brought home to me how art and the stubborn promotion of it throughout communities can invigorate and generally enhance the wellbeing of everybody within them.

I hope we can learn from our Australian brothers and sisters in these trying times and foster relationships between the creative and pragmatic within our own communities large and small to benefit us all.

Obviously I’m biased as a clown but I think whimsy's more important than most people give it credit for.