Without a doubt the first feeling of coming into the Toronto Boatshow, is being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of powerboats. Do Canadians really buy this much power?
Well the answer must be yes, and the rational is apparently this: Canada is covered in shallow lakes and rivers. Sailing is therefore confined to a few places within our country. Fine and good, but given that a huge proportion of people live in these areas, whether along the great lakes, la fleuve St. Laurent, and either of the oceans, how then does this still translate into so many powerboats?
We have an ongoing image problem in sailing, which is that it is a rich mans sport. Now I’m not going to say that yachting is cheap, compared to say soccer, but neither is it so financially unreachable that the so called common man can’t participate.
A Shark, which I choose because it’s a hugely popular boat in Ontario, and Montreal has a decent sized fleet as well, can go for as little as four thousand dollars. Not pocket change certainly, but neither is it beyond the financial reach of the middle class of income. I myself partially own a Shark, and did so on a ridiculously small amount of money. Granted that Storing costs (Yacht Club fees and the like) add up to a fair bit as well, but they’re easily comparable to golf memberships. While golfing has a similar reputation to sailing, there are far more people who golf in Canada than who sail. Heck, Tennis clubs are expensive, and all they’re offering is a length of asphalt with a waist high net in the middle.
Talking to an owner of one of the beautiful 8Meters at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, I can begin to see where this reputation comes from. It’s one thing to have to anti foul and wax a fiberglass boat every spring, but the amount of time and effort that goes into a wooden yacht doesn’t begin to compare. You seem to either need to be unemployed so that you have the kind of time required, or have an amazing amount of coin, so that you can afford to have a team scraping and varnishing your boat at all times.
I used to work with a guy who would just skip all that and put a layer of angel weave glass on it, but I’m fairly sure that wouldn’t work so well on these 60 foot yachts.
Given this, it seems fairly evident that the rich yacht owner comes from this kind of background, but how has it managed to haunt us about 60 years since fiberglass yachts became common things? Surfing doesn’t! They know fiberglass is cheap, even if they do think it takes some kind of voodoo magic man to work the stuff. Seriously, the amount of carvers that are spooked by the idea of having to glass their own boards… they actually seem to want an expert in to take care of it!
Well, when in doubt we can always blame the mainstream media. It works for Palin, so why not?
And there certainly is an element there. The only yachts that have made any kind of real news would be those infamous two that came to us for ye old America’s Cup. While specific costs were never mentioned, the fact that A: both the owners were amongst the richest in the world (one of them at 4th!) and B: They looked really really really expensive, I mean, it had the largest wing ever built by man! (or really anything else on this planet, no local beavers are putting one together anyway)
So this isn’t helping our image.
However, whatever the reputation of yachting, how is that so many of these ridiculously expensive gas guzzling noisy machines are selling? Our boats our powered by an aluminium stick, some fabric and the wind! Just look at all the moving parts in an engine and try and hazard a guess at the man hours that would have gone into those. And the gas! My god, the gas!!!
So how does this dichotomy exist, where rich people sail, and the average Canadian motors along?
No please, somebody explain. I will argue the point with you.
Rant 1, complete.
A real revue? Come back soon.
