Mean Spirited: The New Boat Show Vibe

FRAGMENTATION OF RECREATIONAL BOATING APPEARS NEARLY COMPLETE

Introduction: An earlier version of this article originally appeared just following the Miami Boat Show last winter. Recently, Peter Swanson, who used to be my editor at Passagemaker magazine and who now publishes the Loose Cannon newsletter on Substack.com, contacted me for permission to reprint it during the run-up to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show (#FLIBS). NaturaIly, I was happy to say yes. However, the request and the reader response on Loose Cannon started me thinking about re-posting it myself, as well. Which, as you can see, I've done. Please let me know what your thoughts on the topic are. ― PLF

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” ― Ratty in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

I was thinking about this on my drive back to Fort Lauderdale from the last Miami Boat Show. The distance from the show to my home is only about 41 miles, but it takes almost as long as the 180 mile drive back from Orlando. That’s because traffic on I-95 grows exponentially year to year, at a rate that outpaces the perpetual road construction and often slows movement to a nearly dead stop.

As you might guess, I had plenty of opportunity during that drive to ruminate on the current state of the recreational marine industry and to ask myself why I was experiencing the same kind of half-empty, unfulfilled feeling as when I used to return from a couple of days at Disney World.

If you know my writing. you also know I speak often about the “recreational marine sector”. For me, it’s more a term of endearment than a cold description. That’s because, for nearly my entire adult working life, pleasure boating (yachting) has been my primary haunt — an inviting social melting pot in which marine professionals and boating business people co-mingle with dedicated (some would say obsessed) lay enthusiasts, special-interest journalists, and a wide variety of fellow travelers. In other words, the recreational marine sector has been a sub-culture that values camaraderie and interpersonal relationships above just about all else. And which loves nothing better than gamming about boats.

From the time I first became interested in boating and yachting until recently, it didn’t matter socially what size or kind of boat you were on or had. What mattered was how you treated the boat and your fellow yachties. And just about everyone had, figuratively speaking, a wave and a greeting — and when necessary a tow back to a dock or a navigation chart for tracing — for fellows of the sub-culture.

Oh sure, if you hung around a yacht club long enough, you’d hear plenty of pseudo-hostile banter between “rag-baggers” and “stink-potters”. But when push really came to shove, the etiquette of the sea prevailed, and you’d find most yachties and boaters going out of their way to lend a helping hand to a fellow water rat in distress.

And, in general, a similar ethos prevailed at boat shows…

Not just prevailed, but thrived. Many of us who earned a living on the professional side of the sub-culture believed firmly in the value of long-term marketing and the intentional cultivation of potential future markets. For instance, back when a 125’ tri-deck was considered a “megayacht”, I ran for several years a world-class yacht yard with 600 employees at three locations across the U.S. We built and refit yachts costing tens of millions of dollars — a lot in those days — and when we exhibited at a major boat show, it generally cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars or more in total. Yet, we (and many others in the business) made it a practice to show as many show-goers as we could aboard at least one of our large luxury yachts at boat shows, even when we knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on a Florida beach that the family involved could afford to buy one. I can’t tell you how many times a grinning small-boat owner or parent with a gaggle of giggling kids in tow thanked me or my crew for taking the time to give them an experience they’d remember for years to come. It clearly didn’t make any money for us at the time, indeed, it’s doubtful it ever did. But I gotta tell you, it felt really good to share, if only for a few minutes, our world with some boat show goers who might otherwise never have seen one of those magnificent large luxury yachts up close.

That was “then”, and this is now…

Where boat shows used to literally exude convivial camaraderie for all comers, they are now so large and segmented, and so expensive for builders and other vendors to exhibit at, it’s hard to find anyone just plain having fun. On either side of the sales desk.

At both Fort Lauderdale and Miami this past show season, you had to walk what seemed like a couple of miles just to get to the equipment vendors area. The sailing yachts were quarantined from the power boats, as though one or the other had an STD. And the large luxury yachts, well, they were under lock and key, in many cases guarded by overdressed, inexplicably haughty, reception staff whose demeanor was openly disdainful of those who come to boat shows to window shop and dream.

Historically, Palm Beach was generally a bit better in these respects than Fort Lauderdale and Miami — at least insofar as having a more open and reasonably relaxed ambience. At PBIBS, it was always easier to find parking, easier to get into the show, easier to find a place to sit while scarfing down a hot dog and a beer. In sum, the Palm Beach show was always less edgy and uptight — for reasons I’ll leave you to discern and ponder, although I suspect it had something to do with the difference between old and new money.

My surface impression the last couple of years, is that PBIBS, like Fort Lauderdale and Miami, has succumbed to the foibles of conspicuous consumption and accentuated social consciousness (snobbery?). However, upon deeper reflection, I think it’s something more to do with the boats and yachts themselves. The go-fast power boats, festooned with six (or more) giant outboard engines arrayed on lateral transom extensions, are not only ugly but display a garish un-utility since most of the time they bring enough total potential horsepower to the table to assure it will never be fully absorbed by the boat’s running load, and so never, in fact, generated by the engines — a kind of propulsive power PE (check Masters and Johnson, if you don’t recognize the expression.) In any event, as an evolved type, today’s go-fasts are existentially far too remote from the values of yacht cruising — so much so, the designers and builders of such boats have completely jettisoned the term “accommodations” from their vocabularies, as well as the concept from their minds.

Luxury yachts, on the other hand, have grown so large, so hermetically sealed and climate controlled, at times, you can’t even tell if you’re underway or drifting dead in the water. And the experience of being aboard a “superyacht” is so far removed from what used to be seen as the boating experience, it should not come as a surprise that the boat show environs for large yachts has grown unfriendlier and unfriendlier. So much so that, now, nobody seems to be having any fun.

The 800 lb gorilla in a storm slicker who’s no longer on watch…

The sailing segment used to act, I think, as a sanity mooring for the industry. After all, there wasn’t much incentive to obsess over absolute speed because a sailing yacht with a 36-foot waterline would go maybe 8 knots on a good day (unless you could coax her to surf on the face of huge wave). Moreover, sailors were ingrained with a conservative — some will snicker “cheap” — outlook in terms of their boats, as well their clothing and interior accoutrements. And so they resisted for a long time the intrusion of crass, hard-edged technology. But that state of grace, too, has passed. We now have sailing boats that run (actually fly) on hydrofoils at speeds that sailors older than 25 can’t even pronounce, let alone visualize. Not to mention sails built of materials that are not at all pleasant to handle and destined never be stuffed into a sail bag and snoozed upon in a forward berth.

I know, I know. A lot of this sounds like the ranting of a curmudgeon over the loss of what was past. I suppose that, in part, it is. But what I notice of late — and tend to deeply regret — is the absence of what used to be a unifying spirit of boating and yachting, which stood watch as a cohesive power against the drift to the fragmentation of our daily shore-bound lives. And frankly, it’s an absence that was highlighted by the prevailing ambience of the last round of South Florida boat shows in 2023 - 2024. Hopefully, better sense and some measure of the Corinthian Spirit (thank you, Dean Travis Clarke) will prevail as we head into the upcoming 2024-2025 season

— Phil Friedman

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