Where are all the cruising boats?

August 2008

By Tom Snyder

There is a question that I have always asked, which, I am told, one is not meant to ask. Which, of course, has made me want to ask it even more. But this year, without any outside badgering, I am effortlessly letting it slide. But before I dispense with this question forever, let me share it gently one last time. Where are all of the cruising boats?

That is the question I ask on glorious July and August days on the ocean. I guess the more strident version of the question I have too often asked is, why are 99 percent of them at their moorings 99 percent of the time?

Let’s start with the very good reason why one is not supposed to ask this question. If you were selling any expensive product that is closely allied with extravagant dreams, you would want to discourage the water-in-the-face dash of reality that suggests a misunderstanding about how this product will probably get used. The folks that work hard every day trying to match up the perfect dreamer with the perfect boat don’t need folks on the sidelines creating cognitive dissonance. But maybe it’s not such a bad thing to bring it up: It may even allow folks who buy boats as dream platforms to feel OK about it.

Incidentally, I am not talking here about the many powerboats that were not launched in 2008 – powerboats whose range has been horrifically cut short by astounding fuel prices. And the scarcity of cruising boats under way is not just an artifact of this year or last, or the year before or before that. Cruising boats living at their mooring is an everpresent reality.

Ask the folks who work at marinas. But they have long known not to judge their clients who rarely use their boats, probably because they sense how much a boat owner’s anticipation is truly worth – how much pleasure always resides there.

So what is this more-than-sufficient pleasure that lurks between the jackstands and the dinghy dock? Well, like most of human nature, it ends up being less mysterious than advertised. Here are a few of the many pleasures of simply owning a boat: knowing that it’s there; visiting the boat store in April to get bilge cleaner and, while you’re there, checking out all the cool gear in the other aisles; driving to the boatyard in the off-season, getting a sandwich along the way, and just staring at your shrink-wrapped behemoth; spending the evening Ides of February with the chart kit on the dining-room table, making lists of coves from the cruising guide; sitting in the cockpit at the mooring on a lovely July evening with friends, wine and cheese, and sunset.

Come to think of it, there are many comparable situations; the third-hand Winnebego semi-permanently parked behind the garage so you always have the choice to take to the road; a semi-permanently covered swimming pool that could always be enlisted for a pool party if the right group should assemble; a pondside cottage that may go unused a season or two but is your ace in the hole for a sudden retreat; an antique car in the garage that never sees the road and goes years between real attention but offers the perfect passion for when the time is right.

Is there any useful or meaningful formula for how we ought to use our beloved, if oversized, appendages? Being retired and a part-time consultant, I have been setting the bar high for my “ought-to-use” formula. But have I been setting it too high, feeling guilty when the boat sits idle? Guilty? Perhaps, that is a word that has no place around something as lovely and evocative as a boat. So, to each his own. Boats can be loved wherever they live and in a million different ways.

Tom Snyder sails his boat Blue Moon out of Peaks Island, Maine.