Book Report Part 1

Juice Boats Wave (or Ripple) of the Future?

The first thing you need to know is that everybody has an axe to grind. Everybody has an agenda. Everybody is out to feather his own nest. This must always be kept in mind when reading books like Polluting for Pleasure by Andre Mele.

The purpose of the book is to (supposedly) protect the environment by obliterating the powerboat industry as we know it using shaky suppositions, half-assed theories, and outright disinformation.  Up until now, the boating industry has largely ignored this book not wanting to give this guy any undeserved publicity. I would have ignored it also had I not been informed that about a page and a half was devoted to your politically incorrect “Spectator.” Now I haven’t written a book report since high school, so bear with me.

As I said, everybody has an agenda. And what is Mr. Mele’s agenda? Well, it turns out he is a designer, builder and advocate of three knot, 30’ solar powered launches which he would dearly like to foist on an unsuspecting boating public but not for the obvious reasons you might think. Your Spectator has an agenda too: to protect our industry from guys like Mele so yacht design businesses like mine can respond to a free market and design big, wasteful, “polluting” powerboats allowing me to go out and buy big, polluting, wasteful, politically incorrect sports cars. 

Rather shallow of me wouldn’t you say? The difference between myself and Mr. Mele is that I am completely “up front” with my agenda, but he cloaks his in a veil of obfuscation, half-truths, assumptions and fallacy about the environment. But his agenda goes much deeper than the environment as I will reveal at the end of this series.

Powerboats -- A “National Disaster”

Mele’s premise for the book is clearly depicted on the cover in attention grabbing letters, “Creating nearly as much atmospheric pollution as all of our automobiles and spilling 15 times more oil into our waters than the Exxon Valdez every year unregulated powerboats are creating a national disaster.” In the author’s words the book was written “to show how wrong we have been about the seemingly benign presence of motorboats along most of the scenic coasts and waterways of America, Canada and Europe.”

Would you like to know how great works of scientific research are born? In this case, by his own description, Mele was cruising up the Hudson in a 30’ by 6’ solar powered launch with (2’ freeboard) in headlong pursuit of some obscure world’s record (the slowest powerboat ever known to mankind?). Anyway, there he is squatting in the cockpit surrounded by a rat’s nest of wires alligator clipped here and there, monitoring ammeters and multimeters propped against the bulkhead, while the juice boat was careening up the river at all of 3 knots. 

To quote Mele, “I felt wonderful. I had mastered a raw element. I had a new power…” This magic moment of photon ecstasy was abruptly broken when, again by his description, he was accosted by about a dozen runabouts that appeared out of nowhere making “kamikaze runs” at him. Apparently Mele was deeply offended because nobody smiled or waved. Their wakes caused his log book and meters to get wet, as did his sandwich which was inedible. To quote Mele again: “Worst of all, the boat’s precious forward motion, so carefully monitored and so miraculously achieved, was gone as the boat plunged through an awful slop created by the wakes of my tormentors.” The encounter reportedly lasted around five minutes. Big deal.

A couple of pages later he describes an experience with a “white motoryacht, about 60’ long” heading downriver at around 20 knots. As the vessel drew close to his solar wonder, it slowed down but, even so, Mele’s boat was swamped by, according to him, 3,000 pounds of water which came over the bow. “… the boat had stopped dead and began to turn sideways... in danger of rolling over. I heard a loud crack from above, as the frail canopy structure holding 300 pounds of expensive solar panels began to disintegrate.”

Things Called Waves

Allow me to make some observations here: We have a guy out in a 30’ boat with only 2’ of freeboard and a “frail canopy structure” supporting 300 pounds of solar panels. Should a boat like this, obviously designed to traverse ponds, have been out in the open river? Boat Design 101 states that boats should be designed to encounter things called waves which are fairly common on open stretches of water. And yet, Mele would have all of us riding around in boats like this if he had it his way. Mele’s thing is electric boats. His axe is electric boats and this book is his grindstone.

Scientific Method?

Shortly after the encounter with the dozen kamikaze boats, he dried things up and proceeded up river while reading through a stack of trade magazines and newsletters he had brought with him. The last one was “Boating Industry.” He found another sandwich somewhere and started flipping pages as his record breaker hummed along (apparently riding in this boat is so boring, one finds the need to read magazines while under way!) In the magazine he saw a table of nationwide boat sales and registrations complied by the NMMA. 

Upon reading that there were 12 million registered powerboats in the United States and 8 million of them were outboards, he dug through his soggy briefcase, fished out a solar powered calculator and began to punch numbers. He tried to write the calculations down in his log book but, alas, it was too soaked to take pencil, but he found an old lunch bag and continued his number crunching. That, my friends, is exactly how the “fact” that outboards pollute more every year than the Exxon Valdez was arrived at.    

And so we have it: A guy in a solar powered canoe sits in his waterlogged cockpit munching on a soggy sandwich, punching numbers into his solar powered calculator, scribbling them down in pencil on an old lunch bag after reading some old magazines. From these humble beginnings, sprang the “facts” that warranted a complete book! Yes folks, scientific, methodical, painstaking, fact gathering at its best! Hell, even the EPA never a great friend to boatsmen attributes marine air pollution at only 12 to 27 percent of on road emissions using their own figures. Scientists claim that Mele’s 50 million gallons of two stroke lubricating oil dumped into the water every year is a little bit erroneous - by a factor of 20!

Hey, I don’t remember high school book reports being this much fun! Maybe that’s because my book reports were always on the same book the skinniest one in the school library called -- I’ll never forget it -- “Adrift on an Ice Pan.”  Books under ¼” thick were great for high school book reports giving time for important things like working on the family boat. See you next month.

(Reprinted with permission of Regina Fexas.)

If you would like to read more of Tom's pearls of wisdom, tune in next Friday -- "Fexas Friday." 

Better yet, why not get a full dose of infectious Fexas whenever you need it -- and buy one of the volumes below.  Better yet, why not buy all of them -- we call them the "Fexas Five." They will provide many evenings of fun reading (better than Netflix), and you'll make the widow Regina very happy knowing that Tom will live on with you the way most of us remember him. 

Order 1, 2 or "The Fexas Five" --

To find the "Fexas Five" on Amazon, click here...