Declining numbers of Sailors

[RobF]

When I was in my twenties a modest two bed 1st house cost about 1.25 times my modest £8000 income. How does that compare now?

That is a useful starting point.
Average price of house in UK is about £250k. With a £50k deposit this equates to about £1k in mortgage fees a month. Family budget is likely to be about £1.2k a month for food, utility bills, council tax, car expenses etc. £2.2k a month equates to a £40k salary (considering tax, NI etc) which is not excessive and IMHO achievable if both parents/partners are wage earners. It's then a choice as to what else happens with any free cash. A reasonable 30 foot boat will cost £30k, marina fees will be £5k (on South Coast) and the upkeep another £2k a year. If the boat is bought on a 6 year loan this adds up to £12.5k a year (or £20k of additional salary). £12.5k a year will also buy a nice car over 6 years and 2 weeks of flotilla or sail charter holiday annually. £12.5k a year will also buy some great wintersports gear and 3 weeks on the slopes with enough left over for a season ticket at a premier football club. I think my conclusion is that the opportunity cost for owning and maintaining even a small sailing yacht is too great for the people with a total household income of £60k or more. They would prefer to spend their money elsewhere.

 

[Seajet]

Anyone can have a peeing contest as to who spends the most, how they can't afford a Rolls Royce as well or they could actually get on and get a boat and go sailing - it's never been such a buyer's market with loads of good boats available for low cost.

 

[jac]

Anyone can have a peeing contest as to who spends the most, how they can't afford a Rolls Royce as well or they could actually get on and get a boat and go sailing - it's never been such a buyer's market with loads of good boats available for low cost.

Yes but it's not he purchase cost that is the issue.

It's that people don't want to do the sort of sailing that the cheap boats offer. It's not a question of do I want to sail but how do I want to sail. Back in the 1960's there was relatively little choice of types of boat available. now there are a multitude. 50 years ago there was only 1 way really to go sailing. Buy a boat or find a friend with one. Now there are many ways to do it. CHarter, flexible ownership "clubs" clubs, ownership in this country or abroad, beach clubs, sailing schools, adventure holiday companys, luxury " experience" providers.

People don't want some run down 1970's throwback on a drying mooring that they can only use when the tide is right. ( well some do but it doesn't fit with the modern life style)

Modern younger people are time poor. Some of them are also cash poor by the time they've paid student debt, large mortgage, contributory pension payments, child care whilst they are both earning.

If they are going to be serious about sailing, they need something that can be used at will and that won't need all of their time & money. So chartering works as it's turn key. If they want more competitive sailing then plenty of dinghy classes to suit all tastes which are cheap and can be enjoyed in a spare morning. A cruiser on a drying mooring doesn't enable that. One in a marina might so if they can afford it they will buy it. Against a possible £5k p.a. bill for mooring alone - £10k on a boat looks disproportionate whereas spending £5k mooring to keep a £50k or £100k boat looks in keeping.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Yes, but living as far away from the sea as I do, I am prepared to pay that price for the convenience. Having travelled 100 miles to the boat, there is no way I would then want to go to the hassle that Seajet describes.

It's precisely because it already takes me the best part of three hours to get to the boat that I don't mind another ten minutes to launch the dinghy and row out. However a half-tide mooring would make that impracticably restrictive (the ferries only run 12 hours out of 24, for a start) so if that was my mooring option I'd be in the marina next to you.

 

[JumbleDuck]

When I was in my twenties a modest two bed 1st house cost about 1.25 times my modest £8000 income. How does that compare now?

Twenty five years ago I bought a nice wee flat in a posh bit of Edinburgh for just over twice my starting salary as a very young university lecturer. The flat is now valued at roughly three times a full professor's salary.

Mind you, in 1985 a Westerly Centaur cost about £15,000. According to the BofE inflation calculator, that's £41k today. What sort of brand new cruising yacht can you get for £41k?

 

[JumbleDuck]

And then if we're very honest, there's the bit about expectations. Dad had that Griffon until I was about 15. Then it became a 34 foot AWB. Then eventually a Dufour 40. That's the cruising boat I'm used to.

I think that's an excellent point, and it applies to far more than sailing. For example, when I was a student, 35 years ago, we expected to be skint. We expected to live in manky accommodation, to buy our clothes from charity shops and to haunt the "reduced for quick sale" section of the Co-Op. Most students drank modestly, if at all, and hardly any had a car.

Nowadays the expectation is of comfortable accommodation, Jack Wills T-shirts at £35 a pop, regular eating out (Pizza Express in Jesmond last night was full of students popping in for a meal after sports traning), clubbing a couple of times a week and in many cases a car. And not the equivalent of the old bangers we finally bought when I were lad ... a nice new Fiat 500 or Mini.

OK, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, and I am sure there are still some skint students around. However, the overall image of student life is definitely one of much greater luxury than it was. My lot thought of university as a stage between school and real life; the current lot want to be fully fledged members of the consumer society the from the day they start studying.

Which is partly why they burn through so much money. I've just checked with the BofE calculator, and the current maintenance loan is, allowing for inflation, almost exactly twice what the full maintenance grant was when I started university. I've just checked, and accommodation where I studied has gone up by inflation plus about 20% ... that explains a bit of the difference, but students there now have 80% more to live on than I did.

Sorry, digressing a bit. I agree with you; most young people want nice stuff sooner.

 

[jac]

I think that's an excellent point, and it applies to far more than sailing. For example, when I was a student, 35 years ago, we expected to be skint. We expected to live in manky accommodation, to buy our clothes from charity shops and to haunt the "reduced for quick sale" section of the Co-Op. Most students drank modestly, if at all, and hardly any had a car.

Nowadays the expectation is of comfortable accommodation, Jack Wills T-shirts at £35 a pop, regular eating out (Pizza Express in Jesmond last night was full of students popping in for a meal after sports traning), clubbing a couple of times a week and in many cases a car. And not the equivalent of the old bangers we finally bought when I were lad ... a nice new Fiat 500 or Mini.

OK, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, and I am sure there are still some skint students around. However, the overall image of student life is definitely one of much greater luxury than it was. My lot thought of university as a stage between school and real life; the current lot want to be fully fledged members of the consumer society the from the day they start studying.

Which is partly why they burn through so much money. I've just checked with the BofE calculator, and the current maintenance loan is, allowing for inflation, almost exactly twice what the full maintenance grant was when I started university. I've just checked, and accommodation where I studied has gone up by inflation plus about 20% ... that explains a bit of the difference, but students there now have 80% more to live on than I did.

Sorry, digressing a bit. I agree with you; most young people want nice stuff sooner.

Not sure that it's a fair comparison baselining against student life of 35 years ago. I think it would be more useful to compare student life of say 1980 against everyday life in 1980 and then do the same for 2016. A pizza is hardly extravagant and many places offer significant student discounts during quiet periods so they may have been eating in pizza express for very little.

 

[Robert Wilson]

True,

for many years a lovely wooden canoe sterned yawl was by far the biggest boat in our club - she is a tiny 20' with probably less interior space than a Corribee.

I often look at couples struggling with 32-35 footers in marinas and think ' you're paying the price now for the showers and treble aft cabins, aren't you ? '.

When I finally got someone else to fund my YMO course in 1992, I was the only experienced boat owner aboard inc the instructors; one of my fellow students had just bought his first cruiser in a syndicate, a 37' job.

I genuinely feel sorry for people who haven't tried smaller cruisers, it's meant to be about sailing, not carting around furniture - I tried a larger boat, found the experience far less enjoyable, so got my old boat back.

Both paragraphs are very true, IMO. The first probably the greatest cause of "boats never leaving the marina - but perhaps sat-on therein at weekends."

I am potentially in your position right now - but I haven't yet won the Lottery. I fantasised about buying a big Rustler or Discovery when "my numbers come up", but I feel my 9m sloop of 80s vintage gives me all the fun I need.

I'll spend my fantasy-millions on an Aston Martin37. NOT.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Not sure that it's a fair comparison baselining against student life of 35 years ago. I think it would be more useful to compare student life of say 1980 against everyday life in 1980 and then do the same for 2016. A pizza is hardly extravagant and many places offer significant student discounts during quiet periods so they may have been eating in pizza express for very little.

Have you seen the price of pizza at Pizza Express?

I take your point about comparisons between student and "real" life but I don;t think it goes all the way to explain the change. At the same time as student clothing, for example, has moved waaaaay upmarket, Primark and the like have been pushing costs down for the grown-ups. I think the median student aims far higher up the scale of lifestyle than the median student did 35 years ago.

That also explains the angst so many of them feel when they leave university. Students may want and in many cases have a far more affluent lifestyle than they used to have, but the real world hasn't changed as much as they like. With a few exceptions, graduates still have to start on relatively low salaries (just like they always did), live in cheap and probably shared digs (just like they always did) and live frugally (just like they always did). The problem is that far too many of them think they can walk out of university into the arms of enthusiastic employers who will pay them fat salaries, allowing them to buy a house in their early twenties, drive a new car and travel abroad.

It comes as quite a shock when they find that the life of a new graduate is rather more "Anderson 22" and rather less "First 40".

 

[jac]

Have you seen the price of pizza at Pizza Express?

I take your point about comparisons between student and "real" life but I don;t think it goes all the way to explain the change. At the same time as student clothing, for example, has moved waaaaay upmarket, Primark and the like have been pushing costs down for the grown-ups. I think the median student aims far higher up the scale of lifestyle than the median student did 35 years ago.

That also explains the angst so many of them feel when they leave university. Students may want and in many cases have a far more affluent lifestyle than they used to have, but the real world hasn't changed as much as they like. With a few exceptions, graduates still have to start on relatively low salaries (just like they always did), live in cheap and probably shared digs (just like they always did) and live frugally (just like they always did). The problem is that far too many of them think they can walk out of university into the arms of enthusiastic employers who will pay them fat salaries, allowing them to buy a house in their early twenties, drive a new car and travel abroad.

It comes as quite a shock when they find that the life of a new graduate is rather more "Anderson 22" and rather less "First 40".

I suspect you're right. Many students ( not all by a long way) do come from middle class homes where potentially both parents are working in professional jobs and who therefore come to expect sky TV, latest I phones / pads / Macs, nice holidays/ newer cars/ branded clothing.

Certainly amongst my nieces and there friends, and the offspring of friends, part time work is much more prevalent at age 16 / 17 and of course many students do work through Uni. The impact of the national minimum wage has had an impact at this level - even if not directly impacted as many employers I think just didn't distinguish between the under age and the over age and paid all the minimum wage.

If you are used to living in that environment then even if mummy and daddy can keep subbing you during university, there does come a point when the life support gets switched off. I wonder how many parents basically decide to not retire until children have finished university ( I know that's my plan) meaning that on graduation and securing a role, the parental life line suddenly gets withdrawn ( maybe with a lump sum ) and it's back to reality.

 

[doug748]

Anyone can have a peeing contest as to who spends the most, how they can't afford a Rolls Royce as well or they could actually get on and get a boat and go sailing - it's never been such a buyer's market with loads of good boats available for low cost.

Quote of the day.

It should be framed and hung on the door of the forum.

Some folk are in danger of sounding like they love sailing but simply can't afford the sort of boat that their elevated standards require. When this sort of noise sets up I am always reminded of the old proverb:


"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day

Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime

Tell a man he is a victim and he can moan for eternity"

 

[dom]

Have you seen the price of pizza at Pizza Express?

My son tells me that the University night clubs, Pizza Express, Dominoes etc. have all worked out that students are 'sub-rational' consumers as they lack budgeting experience. As a consequence the bars & businesses apparently time their most expensive nights and purchases to coincide with the arrival of student grants -- especially so during freshers week. The idea is to grab the cash before the next business.

Naturally as the term wears on the students gradually become skint -- so out come the offers like cheap pizzas and drinks, priced at a level where marginal revenue simply exceeds marginal costs. The aim here it seems is to basically just keep the businesses ticking over.

Not sure how prevalent this is, but on the face of it a grimy business practice.

 

[rotrax]

Seajets quote is bang on.

First Mate and I have only been higher rate taxpayers once, during a couple of years when Motorcycle sales were sky high.

Apart from that we have enjoyed average incomes. However, we have been used to spending lots-if not all-of our disposable incomes indulging our joint passions.

This was once Motorbike racing, it is now travelling by water on a large, safe motorsailer.

Spending a large capital amount-enough to buy a small house for cash-has depleted our pension pot significantly. We will lose perhaps 50K when our bodies give up and we pack it in.

It was a consious choice, made after long disscussion and bouncing ideas around.

We could have bought a nice Bavaria 33 Cruiser and kept a lot of the capital. We could have kept the old boat-a cracker-or bought a smaller day sailer. But we indulged ourselves and so far are not regreting it.

When I first started Motorcycle racing I was an apprentice on less than a fiver a week. Somehow I got a knackered old race bike and went and strutted my stuff on the track. Not very successfully if the truth be known, untill I had more dosh and got better kit.

That is still possible in sailing today-as others have pointed out the land is awash with cheap usable boats.

What is required is would be sailors with the time-probably the most valuable thing in todays life-and the will to do it. Add the expectations of partners/wives and camping on the water, which is how many of us started, may not be sufficient to get their aproval.

When First Mate was racing her Motorbikes-with some success-journalists, other riders and spectators would often ask her why more women did not race.

Her reply was always the same-you must ask other women, not me. How many guys do we know whose wives or partners do not take part in sailing, or only at odd times. In our club it is quite high.

I am fortunate with First Mate, but many other couples do not share this common love of the sea and boats.

If a potential sailor is in a relationship the feelings and wishes of the partner must come into the equasion. Often-too often-it becomes a non starter. Work, kids, keeping the house up all claim time, leaving less for boats.

We retired 4 years ago. So far it has been great. If we were younger and working chartering somewhere warm once a year would be the answer, plus scrounging crew places with others in our club.

We live on our boat 4-5 months of the year. If we could not do this we would not bother-the cost and inconvenience would be too much.

 

[JumbleDuck]

I wonder how many parents basically decide to not retire until children have finished university ...

That seems to be the case with many of my colleagues - and they often seem to be waiting till the end of a master's degree, not just the first one.

 

[Tranona]

That seems to be the case with many of my colleagues - and they often seem to be waiting till the end of a master's degree, not just the first one.

Solution there is to have your children when you are young. Mine were self supporting having each done 4 years at uni, well before I was 50. Unlikely to be the same for them though. My older one is 48 and still has one child at primary school!

 

[shan]

Yes but it's not he purchase cost that is the issue.

It's that people don't want to do the sort of sailing that the cheap boats offer. It's not a question of do I want to sail but how do I want to sail. Back in the 1960's there was relatively little choice of types of boat available. now there are a multitude. 50 years ago there was only 1 way really to go sailing. Buy a boat or find a friend with one. Now there are many ways to do it. CHarter, flexible ownership "clubs" clubs, ownership in this country or abroad, beach clubs, sailing schools, adventure holiday companys, luxury " experience" providers.

People don't want some run down 1970's throwback on a drying mooring that they can only use when the tide is right. ( well some do but it doesn't fit with the modern life style)

Modern younger people are time poor. Some of them are also cash poor by the time they've paid student debt, large mortgage, contributory pension payments, child care whilst they are both earning.

If they are going to be serious about sailing, they need something that can be used at will and that won't need all of their time & money. So chartering works as it's turn key. If they want more competitive sailing then plenty of dinghy classes to suit all tastes which are cheap and can be enjoyed in a spare morning. A cruiser on a drying mooring doesn't enable that. One in a marina might so if they can afford it they will buy it. Against a possible £5k p.a. bill for mooring alone - £10k on a boat looks disproportionate whereas spending £5k mooring to keep a £50k or £100k boat looks in keeping.

+ 1 times a million gazillion kertrillion!

 

[Seajet]

' Competetive dinghy racing is a cheap alternative ' ?

I crewed a then new International 14 about 20 years ago, just the hull cost £10,500 - and was outdated in a couple of years !

Yes one can get perfectly good - very good - dinghies for buttons as long as one doesn't mind and / or can afford new sails sooner rather than later - but they are very unlikely to be competetive.

And less of the Anderson being cited as the lower end of the spectrum please you lot ! - I know very good, keen sailors with significantly smaller, more basic cruisers - and they are out actually sailing much more often than the larger boats.

One A22 owner at the club moved up from a Silhouette which had a sea toilet fitted among the cockpit seats - now that is going too far even for student sailing !

If one can row to a mooring and not rely on water taxi's etc, the maths is easy even for me and working with tides is very easily accomplished.

Maybe that's the snag illustrated by those fancying marinas, a desire to beat or ignore nature is never going to have a happy ending in any boat - hence loads used as country cottages, not going anywhere ?

 

[jac]

' Competetive dinghy racing is a cheap alternative ' ?

I crewed a then new International 14 about 20 years ago, just the hull cost £10,500 - and was outdated in a couple of years !

Yes one can get perfectly good - very good - dinghies for buttons as long as one doesn't mind and / or can afford new sails sooner rather than later - but they are very unlikely to be competetive.

And less of the Anderson being cited as the lower end of the spectrum please you lot ! - I know very good, keen sailors with significantly smaller, more basic cruisers - and they are out actually sailing much more often than the larger boats.

One A22 owner at the club moved up from a Silhouette which had a sea toilet fitted among the cockpit seats - now that is going too far even for student sailing !

If one can row to a mooring and not rely on water taxi's etc, the maths is easy even for me and working with tides is very easily accomplished.

Maybe that's the snag illustrated by those fancying marinas, a desire to beat or ignore nature is never going to have a happy ending in any boat - hence loads used as country cottages, not going anywhere ?

Assuming you meant my post above.

Dinghies are much cheaper to sail competitively than a yacht. You give the example of an international 14 but igniore something like a laser or other 1 design. And Int 14's are to dinghies more like open 40's for yacht racing - for those try a new hull costing a couple of hundred thousand every 3-4 years.

The point is - if your budget is tight for sailing then it will go further in any dinghy than in any cruiser. For a given amount of money you can be more competitive in a dinghy than in a cruiser/racer.

And no offence re the A22. we all knw you are passionate about them but the facts don't lie. Not many people bought them when they were being made as other boats met their needs better. I'm sure it's a great boat for you and i'm sure that a 1/2 tide mooring works for you.

The point is that there are probably far more people who want something more like an AWB and a marina, mainly down to the ease of use.

I suspect that lack of use says more about how packed the diaries are, rather than actively avoiding the boat.

 

[Babylon]

I don't particularly care if the number of leisure sailors is (allegedly) up or down - it doesn't impact on my own romance with sailing, nor on the height of tide over any given rock. And anyway, as far as I've casually observed, there are as many yachts and sailors knocking about now as there were when I started twelve years ago!

I'd agree however with the observations made that, over a generation, there have been major changes in the financial circumstances and consumer-aspirations of the middle-classes and their children.

But there has also been something very pervasive going on for the last few decades, which has been having a profound effect on how we make our choices. I'm no sociologist or idealist, but it goes something like this:

In the rose-tinted years up until, say, the early-1980s, there were only three TV channels, no internet, and the mass-circulation press hadn't yet been turned by Murdoch into toilet-paper before you read it. There were corrupt cops and corporate villains as there always are, shallow wannabe celebrities weren't constantly shoved in your face, and good coffee was something you had to make at home. People were conscious of safety without being made neurotic about it, and the best thing to do with an old paedo who tried it on was push him down a flight of steps.

In this world, magazines and clubs were the only real connection people had with others who shared their special interests. We were inspired by the exploits of adventurers or enthusiasts (sailors, climbers, actors, or bird-watchers), who wrote books we could buy or borrow to read. Commercial interests picked up on these passions to make the essential products that enthusiasts would need, and advertisers helped complete the transactional circle.

The world we now inhabit is one where - never mind the illusion of choice! - our very needs are relentlessly manipulated. One doesn't have to be a wooly Corbinite or conspiracy-theorist to recognise that an ever smaller number of financial corporations, manufacturers and retailers have increasingly vast purchasing powers, where every possible human instinct or motivation has been analysed by armies of psychology-trained marketeers. Its a world of extreme commercial noise and the corrosion of public character (vis the despicable pair bashing away at one another to become the holder of the US nuclear trigger).

Eric Rose? Charles Stock? Bernard Moitessier? Roger Taylor? Forget it! Book your 'life-affirming' charter 'experience' in the Med now! You know it the 'real you'!

 

[Seajet]

Jac,

just for the record, the A22 sold nearly 200 boats, which was considered very successful in that market, the Jaguar / Calalina 22 sold thousands in America but not that many here, boats like the Newbridge Eclipse, Dockrell 22, Cox 21, Seal Sinbad and a lot of others were lucky to make double figures, - they were different times.

While the absolute outstanding and unusual example has to be the Centaur at nearly 3,000, the like of which I doubt we'll see again - it had just the right mix to attract lots of newcomers to sailing, so was for a long time rated poorly because people had seen novices bumbling around in them.

Babylon,

you get my vote !

Another simile which strikes me is the replacement of the old Earls Court boatshow - which we often moaned about at the time, but I for one lapped up the atmosphere and the Captain OM Watts stand.

Now we get a place so devoid of soul it simply must have been designed for some sort of experiment by people who've seen ' The Matrix ' too many times - I tried being a lab rat there twice but broke free.

I can see a future where the authors you mention, also the non -PC originals of the Swallows and Amazons series ( let alone The Dambusters ) are furtively sought on the black market...