Sailing end in sight

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robertj

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With the increases in mooring/marina/visitor fees, the suppressed wages of the younger generation and austerity as a whole, are we seeing this decline as the tell tale sign of the end of boating for the ordinary person?
In my harbour there are many many vacant moorings available. If you wanted a mooring ten years ago you had cue on a certain day to get on the list. Now there is no problem.
How can the harbour authorities reverse this or is it too late? Possibly over pricing is a contributed?
 
Boating is cery much discretionary spend.
The debt run up by Brown was fun whilst the credit card was taking the brunt.. now it is payback time for the next generation.
 
I'm not really worried if it was brown or not as they are all the same people no matter what party they belong to. I'm thinking is this decline the end of boating for the young.
My harbour alone I can count on one had sub 30's sailors.
Should the harbour authorities start to worry now or keep pushing their heads in the sand.
Summer visitors this year plummeted even the glorious start and the fantastic bank holiday weekend, visitors noticeable by their absence.
 
This is one of the top items on the RYAs agenda.

Almost every sailing club in the country has declining numbers, as the old die or give up and they are not being replaced by new, young members. Junior membership is way down.

If you look at most inland clubs in the south (QMSC, Datchet, Grafham, Rutland, Oxford, Draycote, etc.) membership + boat park fee is £400-£600, which is not affordable for many. Even those who can afford it are starting to look at it carefully and the clubs are seeing drop-off of long-standing members.

We have definitely been through the boom times with cheap boats and easy credit.
 
Judging by my adult children, they are very short of available time for weekend sailing due to work, socialising and kids. They also do not have the spare cash needed as the latest iPad and a holiday abroad are more important.
 
I think if you have no sailing freinds or family the younger generation would not even think about it
let's face it there is no sailing programs on the television that I am aware of to get people to think hey I might try that
I would of not of thought about sailing if it wasn't for an ex girlfriends brothers taking me out for the day ever since I have been hooked
Most clubs I have look at joining put me of as to hard to get a membership and I can't afford it and the dress code witch is smart and looks good but I don't own a pair of trousers or a shirt
Hopefully my 2 young daughters will like sailing latter on but at the moment they are more exited with crabbing on the jetty
 
Self made problem of the marine industry. When 35-40ft boats are sold as 'starter' boats and anything smaller is uncool, you are pricing everyone including most of us out of the sport.

When I were a lad... (not that long ago) a starter boat was 20-25ft, the current 'I want it and I want it now' generation will need to learn that it cannot happen like that. The next generation should be ok as they will, like us, start from an attainable aspiration point to go sailing.
 
This topic comes up here often and I have to say that every time it does, I always find it an interesting read. The future of boating seems to be a part of the story of how the world is changing around us.

I agree that the suppression of wages is part of it, but certainly not all. Boats have never been cheaper (but storage/maintenance has never been pricier) and I see plenty of young people who 'seem' to be very wealthy indeed driving around in Chelsea tractors and the like, though I suspect much of that is on credit.

I think the young who can afford to sail are time poor and there are not many who are willing to commit to a shiny new boat in a marina when there are so many other leisure options for the wealthy. Those that can not really afford sailing except for running a bargain basement Westerly on a half tide swinging mooring seem to be finding that solution to getting on the water increasingly unappealing.

To illustrate the first point above, I have a friend, the same age as me, who is among the top 1% of earners in the UK. Every year, we do a weeks cruise on my bargain basement Westerly (kept on a cheap mooring). And every year he says he would really love to have his own boat... but he can not justify buying one because he does not have the time to use it.
 
Thank you for the prompt to think about this scenario.

I am one of the "lucky generation", born after the WWII into a well off family that had the funds and work-schedule to allow us as a family to go on various sea-side holidays (from my very young age).
Sand-castle building became paddling, swimming, rowing boats, dinghies and sailing. Then family boat ownership for many years culminating in my own comfortable retirement and ownership of a 9m sloop.

The financial and social trends of the modern family are greatly different to my own life's and I don't see the modern young (in great enough numbers) having the time, inclination and funds to become encouraged to "sail".

Whether or not the harbours, marinas, boat-builders, legislators can do anything positive to reverse the trend I can't say, but doubt it is possible.

I shudder to think what those around the East, South/South-west coasts etc etc have to fork out for every item of our particular leisure sport; couple that with the time required to indulge then I see an accelerating decline in new, young people entering the fray.

How sad.

A very poignant post.
 
robertj said:
With the increases in mooring/marina/visitor fees, the suppressed wages of the younger generation and austerity as a whole, are we seeing this decline as the tell tale sign of the end of boating for the ordinary person?
In my harbour there are many many vacant moorings available. If you wanted a mooring ten years ago you had cue on a certain day to get on the list. Now there is no problem.
How can the harbour authorities reverse this or is it too late? Possibly over pricing is a contributed?
Click to expand...
I visited the Solent for the first time last weekend and did not see any evidence to support your theory.
 
It's not all gloom.

Ours and other clubs in Chichester Harbour went through a decline say 10+ years ago, particularly in dinghy sailing; but it was spotted and acted upon.

Our membership is increasing in dinghies, particularly the Junior section which is booming, a good sign for the future.

Our moorings are consistently 90 % full; so we don't have to turn cruisers away, but there are plenty of active boats.

This success is down to a switched on committee who have been very pro-active; we have at least one Open Day every summer, where people are invited to come along ( inc by a banner on the clubhouse in public view ) and have a look round the club, a barbecue is laid on and the opportunity to try various dinghies and cruisers or just go out in the big traditional safety boat.

We also have a ' Fun On The Water ' day - and lots of non-racing events for the dinghies, like a cruise in company around the harbour, a barbecue then camping overnight - with a safety boat which also carries the tents and gear.

I think this an important point, for too long dinghies at all clubs were ' racing or nothing ' which put a lot of people off.

There are two fleets of singlehander dinghies available for the Juniors to simply sign out and go for a sail, with safety backup.

We have also always been heavily involved with Sailability for the disabled, there are two small fleets of adapted trimarans and a Norfolk Oyster for them and again it's a very active setup.

Other clubs in the harbour have woken up too and we now have a lot more joint events.

15 or so years ago I too felt sailing was on the way out, but now it's anything but.
 
robertj said:
With the increases in mooring/marina/visitor fees, the suppressed wages of the younger generation and austerity as a whole, are we seeing this decline as the tell tale sign of the end of boating for the ordinary person?
In my harbour there are many many vacant moorings available. If you wanted a mooring ten years ago you had cue on a certain day to get on the list. Now there is no problem.
How can the harbour authorities reverse this or is it too late? Possibly over pricing is a contributed?
Click to expand...

There are two sides to this. I agree that ownership seems to be on the decline with the younger generation. Indeed this was a topic of conversation at a Club we called into earlier this year. The general situation there was that younger people were still learning to sail (and very well evidenced by the number of them out on the water) BUT they were not buying into sailing - probably due to all of the factors above.

On the other hand, the Marina berths were pretty well full with boats. A large number of those boats never left their moorings. The individual reasons for that are obviously not known but I do believe that there are a great number of boats which are basically unsaleable (and unsailable) and are just taking up space. As far as I am aware, there is no way to dispose of an 'unwanted' boat and I suspect that there are a number of 'owners' who are just paying a Marina to park their basically unwanted 'asset'.
Obviously the manufacturers are still able to sell new boats which add to the numbers but where do the old boats go???
 
The marina I use is full, but my yacht club - which is certainly far from "stuffy" - has a mix of cruisers & dinghies.
Dinghy sailing is declining, with a fraction of the dinghies sailing each weekend it once had. Cruisers are disappearing fast; possibly due to the hassle of launching & laying up each year, along with annual maintenance required to actually go sailing.
If you have the money to pay a marina to launch, lay up jet wash etc & If you can step on & off then it is easier to go sailing. If you have the hassle of all the extra work then it soon eats into available time & the enjoyment disappears. Trouble is that the sort of job that earns the money to pay for a marina leaves less time for oneself & family.
 
Seajet said:
Our membership is increasing in dinghies, particularly the Junior section which is booming, a good sign for the future.
Click to expand...

That's great and sounds like you have a good club there, but it's not difficult to get pre-teen kids (and more accurately their parents) excited enough to get them out on the water.

But how many will go on to sail as adults. In my post #8 I mentioned my friend... he and his son sailed dinghy's and were members of a club when is son was aged 11 or so. His son is now 19, shows zero interest in boats and has not sailed since he was 13 or 14 and both he and his Father gave up the club membership and sold the dinghy years ago.

Seems to be a theme emerging from many posts here that for some, money is the issue and for others, it's the lack of time despite having the money.
 
Decline in sailing or at least boat ownership is down to a lack of time and money in my generation (born '75). I too am interested in this topic every time it comes up - i cant help but think how the coastline and the faciliites around it are going to change once the boomer generation is no longer with us.

Having come back from a weekend in the west country it was bought into sharp focus when wondering around a couple of boatyards that were chockablock with boats not launched. Spoke to a bloke working there and was told this was a good year for boats in the water.

Apropos marina / marine costs, thats a whole other discussion, i guess as the numbers owning boats decreases the higher the costs become for those who still do to justify the existence of these facilities. Stupidly thought a few years back they'd be a renaissance in sailing given how cheap boats are but being of the demographic that thought would take up the sport i realise i spend less time on hobbies and more time working - its just the way it is now.........................
 
Our local club seems to do quite well, they've recently built a new clubhouse and renewed the dingy fleet. But it's really all about kids in dinghies, and I don't think there's very much progression to yachts. And this is in a part of the world where you can keep a boat really quite cheaply.
It seems that owning and using a yacht is just a minority interest, and something that the rest of the population don't seem to get. I was trying to explain to someone the other day that if we go on a two week cruise we don't just cast off and then sail around nonstop for a fortnight. Leisure sailing is almost invisible in terms of media coverage. The few portrayals your see revolve around luxury yachts owned by millionaires, or occasionally cameo appearances in disaster movies, neither of which is representative.

There is, of course, an argument that boat use is not so much declining as changing, along the same lines as everything else- people are chartering rather than owning. As a society we are trending towards buying experiences rather than posessions, perhaps fuelled by the ability to share said experiences online. Also personal posessions have become almost disposable and we are perhaps less attached to keeping things for a long time,
 
I'd love it if sailing declined to the point where there are very few moorings cluttering up all the South Coast Harbours and a lot less people around at weekends. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
 
No doubt it is a bit of everything mentioned that puts people off.

Boat owning carries a huge fixed overhead in terms of cost and time. Few people can justify, or find the time, for running a boat and foreign holidays, golf, hang gliding, adventure camping, cycling, technology, surfing, concerts, and the rest of our modern diversions - all of which can carry no overheads at all. You buy your tennis racquet and if you don't play, that's it, next weekend it's paddle boarding.

A respected younger member of our fraternity said, I paraphrase:
" I race on a 40 foot modern boat with new sails and top equipment, how can I get excited about buying a 40 year old Westerly?"
He has a point.
In the olden days, getting a wooden Silhouette as a thirty year old, I thought I owned the world.

Maybe cruising will regress to what it was in the 1960s peopled by hard core. enthusiasts, largely folk who live on, or near, the sailing centres. Others will do doubt keep boats abroad or charter.
The established dinghy and keelboat classes seem to thrive and there is a steady stream of interested youngsters in club dingy fleets.
Perhaps we should dig out the old hackneyed standbys and "suck it up" because "times are moving on"
 
I agree less young people buy cruisers now, even cheap secondhand ones, but it is happening, we have several young cruiser bods just starting, and I can think of a couple who started with very small cheap cruisers like Silhouettes etc and now have fin keelers and largish AWB's respectively.

I wonder if people nowadays approach sailing the wrong way; if I'd gone to a boat show and looked at the prices for new boats, then marina fees thinking that's how it's done, I'd have written off sailing instantly !

Instead of that I have a lovely sheltered half tide mooring 5 minutes row from two old pubs and a nature reserve; with a locked tender pen right by the slip, the club's own travel hoist every spring & autumn, winter ashore and membership I pay around £450.

It's no grotty club either, we have a good clubhouse with views over Chichester and Langstone harbours, with slipways to and moorings in both...
 
I would love to have another boat but being on the E coast many moorings are drying/part tide which does not suit the type of boat or sailing I am interested in and marina or deep water moorings so insanely expensive that the cost just cannot be justified. Laying out the capital for a boat is hard enough but you do get much of it back then you sell, but the thousands it costs to keep the damn thing tied up makes my eyes water. For a 35 footer the marina cost alone gets me 4 weeks charter on a 45ft bendytoy in Greece with 3 others sharing for a whole month! Add maintenance, insurance and an engine/sails fund and it must be more like 6 or 7 weeks.

Make sense of that if you can!
 
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