[Grain de Sail II cargo sailboat off the coast of Normandy]
[Bow of ship at sea]
[Ship]
[Crew unfurling sails]
[Captain Yann Jourdan walking the deck outside the bridge and looking up at sails]
Yann Jourdan (interview): “We always use the sails and only the sails. I mean, we don’t use the engine, even in really bad weather.”
[Jourdan with crew]
Yann Jourdan (interview): “Last crossing, we did a maximum speed of 18 knots and an average speed of 11 knots, so that gives the last crossing 15 days from New York to Saint-Malo.”
[Sea off the coast of Normandy from the side of the ship]
[Ship]
[Forklift on quay with small blue shipping container]
[Ship moored in Saint-Malo harbor]
[Harbor crew loading crates onto ship]
[Grain de Sail founder and Director General Jacques Barreau stepping off the boat]
Jacques Barreau (interview): “The position of the Grain de Sail fleet is to be at minus 90% compared to the usual carbon footprint. Another way of saying it – it’s between 1 and 2 grammes per ton, per kilometre. Compared to the best container ship, it’s 10 the minimum. 10 to 40. So we try to be 10 times lower, between 1 and 2. A car, it’s 100. A truck, it’s 300. A plane, it’s 800. So, yeah, 800 for a plane, 1 gramme for a ship like that. That’s our strategy and we want to not only reduce the carbon footprint, we want to kill it.”
[Crew loading ship]
Jacques Barreau (interview): “When you are transporting goods with fuel, you don’t pay the pollution, you don’t pay the global warming, you don’t pay the noise, under sea noises. It’s free! So it’s normal that it’s very cheap. With this kind of boat, you pay the rigging, you pay the sail, you pay for everything. That’s why the cost of the transportation when you want to be compatible with the environment it’s more expensive, but the normal price is here.”
[Crew loading crates on the ship]
Jacques Barreau (interview): “Probably that we will have something like several thousand of wind powered container ships across the world. But we will need, in 20 years, to reduce the quantity of goods transported across the oceans. If we don’t succeed to reduce this amount of goods transported, it’s not going to work.”
[Crew and captain lowering sails as night falls]
Yann Jourdan (interview): “At the moment, I have my son on board and I also do it for my son, for him to be proud of what I did maybe and when he will be in age of saying, ‘hey Daddy, what did you do to improve the situation?’, well, I did this sailing cargo because it’s my job to carry cargo on the sea so I did my best to make my job in a clean way.”
[Crew on the ship lowering sails and approaching the harbor]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.