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The future of the sailing world. Why are there so few young people cruising??

119K views 908 replies 179 participants last post by  captain jack 
#1 ·
I'm curious on opinions on this one. When Baby boomers were in their 20's there were lots of them in small capable sailboats (some they made themselves) cruising across oceans; but now-a-days the majority of twenty-year olds appear to be utterly useless. I just don't get it, and I'm in my twenties, and cruising.


I'm also curious as to where people think the future of the sailing industry is going if there are so few young people involved?

Any thoughts?
 
#658 ·
All the young people I know are broke and scared of whether they will even have a job, or a full time job, in six months.

I came out in the work force in the early eighties and we had it made compared to these kids. I bought my first big boat, A Cape Dory 25D when I was 26 years old, a year after I had been on a job (who would feel that secure with just a year on at a job these days). I've got a stepson who is 23 and one who is 29, and they both are barely making it.

Of course, I got married early, and we lived off one salary while saving the other. Most kids now don't get married, even after they have babies.

It's a different economy, and kids today do a lot of things that hurt them financially to boot.
 
#659 ·
You can have no assets or a low income and its fine as long as you have someone or something to fall back on. Family can be a type of wealth.

If not, if you are truly on your own and not wealthy - you better watch out. I started with nothing, no way home and no one to watch my back or support me at all...... and that taught me to watch out and support my adult kids so they can take some chances... and it taught me not to judge others so harshly.
 
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#660 ·
I think I like the idea that family can be a place to turn to for support. Not for cash but real support.
Fear of failure is why most folks do not do whatever they are very capable of doing. This would lead you to think the young would have less fear. Todays world is full of fear. Change can happen faster than ever. one would not set out to cross the sea out of season and in unpredictable changing weather. IE winter North Atlantic. You might say the young might be looking for better weather. Plans are what make dreams. Fail to plan = plan to fail. Good Day, Lou
 
#661 ·
The thing with kids is, that you want to be there to catch them if they need it, to give them confidence, but you don't want them to be so sure that you will catch them, that they don't try and make it on their own.

It's a tough balance, for sure. But, my parents seemed to get it right with me, so I try and follow their lead.
 
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#662 ·
Our club did a members survey recently and, out of 237 responses, 0 were between the ages of 20-29, 3 were 30-39, 37 were 40-49. The vast majority were between 50 - 70 with 37 older than 70!

Younger people are attracted to the water but they tend to be on kite-boards, kayaks, white water canoes, or speedboats or evil jet skiis.

Perceptually, sailing is, unfortunately regarded as A. an older persons sport, or B. a rich persons sport.

Interstingly, I have come across a lot of middle aged people who have got tired of driving in gridlock (I live in toronto where gridlock is a fact of life anytime) up to the cottage every weekend, sold their cottage and bought a huge honking boat with the proceeds.

For me, we didn't become sailboat owners until we became empty nesters and didn't have the financial pressures of raising kids or helping with university tuition. My kids enjoy the boat and may get into it some day, but their priorities are now on their careers and starting families etc.
 
#668 ·
Our club did a members survey recently and, out of 237 responses, 0 were between the ages of 20-29, 3 were 30-39, 37 were 40-49. The vast majority were between 50 - 70 with 37 older than 70!

....
For me, we didn't become sailboat owners until we became empty nesters and didn't have the financial pressures of raising kids or helping with university tuition. My kids enjoy the boat and may get into it some day, but their priorities are now on their careers and starting families etc.
That's why cruisers tend to be older. It is needed time for cruising and lot's of money for the boat and lifestyle, at least for many.

If you go to a charter company and ask about the average age I am pretty sure that it is much lower, even if not for teenagers: Charter a boat is also expensive.

I really don't understand the title of this thread. probably it is an American thing. around here the problem is TOO MANY PEOPLE CRUISING. In many nice places It is hard to find a place to anchor, marinas are crowded and take advantage to charge huge prices.

This year in Italy I had no other option then to paid 35 euros for a buoy and I read that another guy had paid 70 euros for one on another Island ( any boat bigger than 10m). There are some nice places that I will never visit with my boat because it is too deep to anchor and the marina charges (in medium season) 200 euros for a 41ft boat:rolleyes:

Regards

Paulo
 
#663 ·
I can't speak for other young people. However I am 25, my father one of those young guys who sailed back in the day and introduced me to sailing when I was a really young boy. He had to stop sailing when I was around 7. Later on when I was about 20 I had an unexplained urge to sail an I did whatever it took to buy my first boat.

Any of my friends who I have taken out sailing have absolutely loved it! So I think the main issue is so many young persons these days just don't know anything about sailing or that sailing is a live and very active sport. Unless you know someone who sails then you won't consider sailing as something you can practically take part in. I think the schools and communities need to put more effort in opening doors to sailing for young students. Otherwise it will just be looked as something old people with lots of money does!

Shane
 
#664 ·
After a few previous posts, I have noticed people are blaming the lack of young people in sailing due to the economy and the difficulty of finding a job along with coping with student debt. At least from what I see here in Toronto there are 3 issues with the younger generation.

1. Laziness. I know for a fact my parents and everyone here work(ed) a whole lot harder then the majority of my peers

2. Poor choices. Students these days need to be more realistic when it comes the schooling they choose. They blow 30 grand in tuition on garbage courses that there are no jobs in, even in the best of economies! Not everyone can be artists and philosophers!

3. Priorities and money management. Going to the bar and clubs is more important than paying off credit cards and student debt. And playing video games than getting off their butts and finding a job, any job, even if it means a job that you didn't go to school for (see point 2)!!
 
#667 ·
I'm 27 and started sailing while have been sailing my own-purchased boats since I was 20. I think that the interest in sailing comes in generational waves, like a kid or teenager who gets enrolled in a club or team, then quits to focus on other things (job, college, early 20's social life) and then the flame comes back when they can afford it again, both money and time.

The only thing that stops people around this age is the responsibility requirements. To buy something high-ticket like this, to maintain it, to store it on land or in water, and to time-manage a personal life that allows days or afternoons of freedom to get the pay-out of sailing. It's a balance, and realistically not everyone from 18-30 (generally) is responsible enough.
 
#669 ·
I can tell you my take on it. I'm a 29 year old male for reference. I just purchased my first sailboat about 3 months ago. Honestly I was just never exposed to it. My parents never sailed, my grandparents never sailed, why would I sail? My parents skied and spent lots of time camping so those are things that I got into. Not only that but I was under the impression that sailing was super expensive. Even little boats I assumed cost 10s of thousands of dollars. My wife and I both have significant college debt so I just thought we couldn't afford a boat. Then I found a boat design called pdracer. Literally a plywood boat that should cost 500-1000 dollars to build. After that I started researching and found that decent boats could be found in that price range almost ready to sail.

So to sum it up, High student loan debt + not being exposed to sailing made me believe that I couldn't do it. Not only that but it is intimidating when you don't have help. I believe you all are trying to make it more complicated than it really is.
 
#671 ·
In my area there is an 5-15 year waiting list to join a salt water yacht club. The better clubs for young sailors (more frequent group sailing, better sailing facilities, less high cost amenities like pools/monthly bar minimums) are the longer waits. Perhaps the more uncertainty in life when starting out and the length of the wait list are factors?
 
#672 ·
Interesting thread, I think that this generation will not sail like the baby boomer generation . It is a generation of plug and play. Chartering in destinations will continue but boat ownership and all the maintanance will be avoided.... Cant say I blame them . The days of familys working on the boat in spring getting it ready. Or cruising long distances in frail boats is going the way of he square rigger it will be a few romantic souls and the rest will jet to the Caribbean jump on a charter do the islands get the tee shirt ,the tan and enjoy the best parts. Im jealous kidding there is nothing so good as getting there on your own but some will not get that.
 
#673 ·
The few younger sailors that I know (myself included) have pretty flexible work arrangements. I don't know that I could do a normal 9-5 job with a typical commute then pack everything up to go sailing every weekends & provision & keep the boat clean & do laundry at home & ...

I work from home and so does the other young couple on my dock. The sailing couples that are young and both work or have small kids have trailer sailors and talk about "someday" having a 25-30 footer. If we weren't planning some extended cruising we'd still probably be sailing Hobies and saying we'll get a cruising boat when we're tired of getting soaked. Last time I ran the numbers, 3 weeks of chartering was cheaper than ownership.

I wouldn't be surprised if the demographics in marinas & yacht clubs haven't changed that much over the last 20 years. Were the boomers really buying cruising boats in their early 30s?
 
#675 ·
I wouldn't be surprised if the demographics in marinas & yacht clubs haven't changed that much over the last 20 years. Were the boomers really buying cruising boats in their early 30s?
Also consider that to get a decent job...well, a job that would pay the equivalent to one that a high school grad could get 20-30 years ago, requires a college degree. State school tuition can run up towards 45K for a degree. :rolleyes:

20 years ago, not as many people in their early 30's started their lives with 40-50K of school debt.
 
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#680 ·
I am young. I sail in fact i cruise. Learned sailing dinghies when i was really young sold everything and bought my boat, that being said I never go out my family has loaned me quite a bit of money and my only expenses are boat expenses and college, also i'm not doing college all at once which gives me the time to work and work on my boat on the semesters that I take off. i have found however that we are a dying breed. The funny thing is as a young sailor i think I actually use and want less technology on my boat than many of my middle aged counterparts do. I do not have or want radar, night vision scopes, satellite internet or phones, i have ais, a chartplotter and 2 vhf radios, one dsc one not oh and an electric autopilot for the great lakes. i have found that it is very ard for me to find people to sail with me and a lot of the people i have sailed with that are my age have been almost astounded with how simple my boat was, as they were expecting electric toilets water heaters, lavish luxury and I have a simple 30 foot sloop from the 70's with a manual head, brass galley hand pumps, etc. i think the desire to discover to cultivate one's own comprehension of the great knowledge of the world is dying. I don't identify with many of my peers. I'm doing the college things slowly because I have to but i am not content just learning these lists of info so I can get a god paying job. I prefer to develop an accurate perception of reality by discovering. Sailing is one of the last great unknowns. Before I bought my sailboat, I had crewed on others but i had spent time hiking, biking and kayaking. I think all of that is dying out, long voyages just don't happen by young people in the same fashion anymore its awful. There has always been something to me thats enchanting enlightening and romantic about the great explorers, i was heavily influenced by Tania Aebi, Laura Dekker, Jessica Watson and most of all Jarle Andhoy and the crew of berserk. My biggest sailing goal is to go to antarctica not on my own boat of course I am not as insane as Jarle Andhoy. But young explorers still do exist.
 
#683 ·
Awwww :( Here in WA we have tones of young kids with boats, at 45 I'm the crusty old guy on the dock. This summer as I cruised I was impressed with how many young ones were out. I purchased my first boat at 18 was the youngest by a good 15 years now it seems here more and more every year we see younger people leaning the advantages of living and cruising on small boats :) BTW if I ever make it that way I would love to cruise with you but alas I am headed to Argentina on my boat. This might be a good place to plug Lyle Hess;)
 
#684 · (Edited)
I don't know. I've met some very adventurous and motivated young people. I suspect that for most of them sailing and especially cruising is just not on the radar.

In some respects sailing is probably a little like hunting. If you aren't exposed to it as a youngster, you're much less likely to pursue it as an adult.

Why aren't as many kids getting exposed to sailing today? I think there are lots of reasons including a lack of unstructured leisure time for both themselves and their parents. Further, while boats can be found for almost nothing, keeping them on the water is increasingly expensive (though I'm sure there are exceptions).

If you don't grow up close to a large body of water then you're probably not going to spend much of your youth sailing, and affordable land close to large bodies of water is hard to come by.
For kids near where I live, there are youth sailing classes but these are on small lakes that severely limit power boat access.

The lake on which grew up is overrun with power boats and personal watercraft, but no sailing school and few sailors. It's a shame. There was an active yacht club and weekly races of several different classes when I was young. Now, there's nothing.
 
#685 ·
Having been paying and working my way through college, I think the 'college debt' thing is a pretty lame excuse for not sailing.

In the first few years of college I also built up a lot of debt, until I learned tricks for living frugally and learned that research labs on campus have plenty of money to hire students who work hard.

Living frugally while working in on campus labs, I paid off all of my debt and now invest most of my tiny student worker income. Eventually I bought a Catalina 22 for $800 which I restored and outfitted as a cruising boat, and have been doing week long cruises several times per year while attending school full time.
 
#686 · (Edited)
duchess, you sound like me. at 42 I am not a 'young' man, by most standards, although no one guesses me to be more than 34. but I started sailing when I was 24. I don't do motors on sailboats. I have never even used one. i'm a sailor. if I can't sail to and from a dock or set and leave anchor, by sail alone, I have no right to call myself a sailor. I am just now checking into a used electric outboard, in case of emergency on the bay.

none of my friends ever sailed and most everyone I have met on the water is a generation older than me, including the newbies. I have, recently met some guys in their 20s. they were just beginning to sail and I helped them get their boat back on their trailer. I never meet women my own age or younger, that sail...unfortunately.lol

I also am an anti-tech rebel. simple and old fashioned is better. it's cleaner and more pure. it's free of the taint of the modern tech rat race we have made for ourselves. that's how sailing should be: free. to a degree, technology is a trap. it ensnares us and keeps us dependent on the system. when I drive to a strange place, I don't use GPS. I get out a map. most people you meet can't even use a map.

I also find many of the older 'sailors' I meet, who haven't been sailing since childhood, are not really that knowledgeable about actually sailing. it's funny watching them trying to sail away from the dock and funnier watching them try to return. many don't bother. they motor out before raising their sails and they strike sail a ways from the dock and motor back.

if I am in my dinghy, which I made a sprit sail for, no one even has any idea what type of sail it is. I had one guy guess it was a lateen (?) and one guy tell me he liked my gaff rig. a lot of them just ask what type of sail it is and had never heard of a sprit sail, when I tell them. during the golden age of sail, sprit sails were very popular and are one of the oldest types of sail but all they know is Bermuda rigs.

a lot of them over trim, too, wasting a lot of the wind's force on heeling. they say they do it because it feels like they are getting more force on the sails. they are surprised when I suggest they ease the sails til they luff and then sheet them in just enough to stop them from luffing.

they don't seem to be prepared, either. they usually don't carry any extra rope, for emergency use, and can't seem to handle an emergency on the water. for instance, this older guy was taking his young grand kids out for a sail in a 16' boat. he had no motor. I was sailing my dinghy. it was a bit heavy, that day. 15 kts or so, plus gusts.

I saw their main come down on top of them, suddenly. they appeared to be struggling so I sailed over to them. his halyard shackle had come apart. he had no motor. no oars. not even a paddle. with little kids in the boat! he also had no rope or a knife to cut rope with.

I sacrificed a bit of my stern line and, while sailing around in tight circles, instructed him to strike his jib. I told him to tie a roband through the cringle at the main sail's head. then, I told him to hook the jib halyard to the forward side of the roband and hoist the main with that. he couldn't sail up wind on jib alone. too much lee helm. he had been trying. anyhow, he was able to sail back to the dock that way. I followed him back, to make sure he'd be ok.

he and his wife thanked me profusely and half jokingly suggested they should get my number so they could make sure I was sailing when he went out, in the future, in case he had another emergency. the funny thing is, they used to own a 40' sloop, on the bay. really nice people but he was still totally unprepared and had no idea how to go about saving himself and his grand kids. thankfully I was sailing that day.

I think it's a generational thing. many of the baby boomers that sail are like the ones that ride motorcycles ( which I also do ). they aren't serious about it ( not hard core, as i'd usually say ). it's a hobby that money affords them. as far as the ones that own motorcycles go, they ride a little...never in bad weather...and then they sit around drinking and trying to convince the other boomers on bikes just how hard core they are, even referring to themselves as biker trash...with their big mc mansions and expensive cars. it's a game to them. i'm not saying all older ( baby boomer age )sailors are that way, of course, but I have observed that tendency a lot.



those of us who grew up as bikers actually ride. we can generally figure a way to jury rig our bikes and limp home, if a cable breaks or something, and we are not afraid to get wet or cold. there are less bikers in the younger generations, most of those generations prefer fast crotch rockets, but the ones that are starting to ride cruisers and choppers are more hardcore, like my father's generation and myself.

perhaps there is a similar trend with sailing.

if you haven't already, you should go on youtube and search for 'hold fast'. I discovered it by accident late one night. it's cool.

I can identify with those people, although I spent most of my life fighting my own nature and trying to be 'responsible' and work towards the type of life I was told I should aim for. so I haven't gotten a chance to do something like they did, yet. I have never succeeded in seeking those accepted goals, very well, though.. I just don't care that much about material crap. it's all about the experience of life, to me; the adventure. now, I find myself wondering what I have been doing trying to achieve someone else's life goals and i'm having a shift in my way of life. I am not fighting my own nature that much, an more. it never did me much good anyhow. I've always done things like ride my chopper through rain, snow, cold, and twice through flash floods ( I went 7 years without even owning a car and I don't live in California or florida, either )or sailing a 9' dinghy in 20 kt gusts, in the dead of winter, when I had to shovel snow off of the dock before setting sail (and I can't swim). I never fit into that cookie cutter society, usually being the crazy man amongst my friends and the other people I encounter. i'm the guy who never has the newest electric gadgets. i didn't get a cell phone til about 4 years ago. i'm the guy with the sailing dinghy in the back of his beat up old truck so I can sail any time I can get a free moment. i'm just not the guy with a house, two cars in the garage, a big screen TV to watch the game on ( I don't care about sports. too many things to actually do. life is not a spectator sport ) and 2.5 kids in after school activities. but I digress...
 
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#687 · (Edited)
Though not a story about sailing per se (and not at all about cruising), there was an article about the lake I grew up on in the local paper yesterday. A marina wanted to double the number of slips they had and ran into a firestorm of complaints from lake property owners.

The property owners complain that there are already too many boats on the lake. It was one of the first lakes in the area to become infested with zebra muscles (an invasive species). They also say that non-resident boaters ignore no-wake zones which is dangerous, causes property damage, further erosion, and leads to diminished water quality.

I agree that the boat traffic is crazy (I wouldn't even attempt to sail there on the 4th of July for example) but it is sort of the pot calling the kettle black. A homeowner can legally have up to 6 slips on their property and many allow other people to keep boats on their property for money that's exchanged under the table.

The reason I bring it up is that while we do have a lot of lakes, access to them in the metro area is becoming constrained and expensive. Though somewhat tempered by the real-estate crash a few years ago, lake property is not attainable on a middle class income without some help.

The combination of expensive lake property, crowded boat launches, and only a small number of slips available, means sailing isn't really going to thrive there and it hasn't.

There is something else going on though because sailing has declined dramatically there even among the people for whom it would be convenient and affordable, - the property owners.
 
#688 ·
when talking about lake sailing, a decline in sailing might coincide with an increase of power boats, fishing, and possibly see doo's ( if allowed ). as the complaint noted, power boaters ignore no wake zones, tend to ignore right of way, and tend to be rude as a general rule. by rude, I mean swamping smaller craft as they go by. that doesn't effect cruisers, but it can effect smaller boats. on lake Marburg, I have found that to be the case. it makes sailing a small boat frustrating, at times, even dangerous. it can really tick you off. the stress of dealing with buttholes is one thing I sail to escape. perhaps other people felt the same way and stopped sailing at those lakes because of it. it never stopped me but most leisure time sailors aren't all that dedicated. if a hobby stops providing the benefits which drew a person to it, in the first place, they tend to stop participating in that hobby.

while cruising is the topic of the thread, I think that your point is very relevant. for many people, the investment of money and effort to own a cruising sailboat are too much. for them, dinghies and daysailers are the only avenue for sailing. today's daysailer can be tomorrow's cruiser, but not if they abandon sailing before they reach that stage.
 
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