barca nova
Well-Known Member
No, I dont think that it is in a death spiral but there are a couple of issues. The first is that young people with sufficient money often dont seem to have the inclination to join clubs and if they go sailing do a charter somewhere warm instead. Certainly my son is like that. The second issue is the lifespan of grp boats - they dont rot away like most wooden ones do, so you end up with people owning boats 40 and 50 years old, often not using them and clogging up marinas because the boats are unsaleable. At one of my clubs there is a back fence crammed with "old bangers" such as early westerlies, old colvics, macwesters etc which are never launched and whose owners think they are still worth something. We managed to put a number of them when the owner had died / walked away, into landfill last year. We really should put another 20 in the same hole.Having just been through the sale of our boat and looking for another I can’t get over the harsh realities. Boats that would have been £10,000 pre-Covid are now un-saleable at £3,000. Brokers tell me they have a number of clients who would give away their boats AND pay the £1,000 brokers commission.
Marinas are now so insanely expensive, people in their 20’s and 30’s trying to claw their way onto the housing ladder would laugh at the idea of boat ownership. A humble swinging mooring is still £2,500 a year with lift in/out, winter storage, maintenance and insurance.
Some youth sailing programs are thriving, our local club is. But that’s no longer going to lead on to boat ownership. The over-priced marinas will cheerfully turn themselves into the waterfront housing developments they’ve always wanted to be and the trades that support boating will dwindle.
High end stuff will still be made and sold and they’ll be a thriving hire market but as for the days of families going sailing in their own boat - that’s going fast
Its as if the car market was still full of Morris Marinas and Vauxhall Crestas that were refusing to rust away.
