Utah Boat Show Thoughts
I walked away from the Utah Boat Show this year with a number of conflicting thoughts. There were exciting new innovations from major boat builders and small companies. Every vendor I spoke with told me that sales were up this year over last year, and that last year was a good year. I’ve covered these exciting thoughts over the past few episodes. I also wondered just how sustainable the current model of boat sales will be over the coming years. It’s these thoughts that I bring to this episode.
Affordable boats
A while ago I had the chance to talk with a listener, Alex Sanford, about how water skiing is in decline. One reason we thought this may be was that the sport was getting so expensive. This thought was on my mind as I wandered the floor of the Utah Boat Show this past February. One of my goals for the show was to identify “affordable” boats for not just water skiing, but for towed water sports in general. I ended up being very disappointed with what I couldn’t find. I ended up, after three days at the show, with just a few options, which I’ll list below. Oh, and what did I qualify as affordable? I put the cutoff at $50,000. That’s right. I don’t know just how affordable that really is, but it marked a split in the market between boats that fell safely under that amount and those that went upward to the stratosphere.
The Scarab 165
was a surprise affordable boat from a more luxury boat maker. However at just 16′ 6″ long and a capacity of only four people, it had some real tradeoffs to get the price down. It did feature a tower to pull a skier or boarder from and a nice sized platform. With it’s low seating capacity, though, it would be hard to take out for a day. You are more tied to making short runs from a beach with a few friends at a time while others wait on shore.
There were a LOT of pontoons
at the boat show. The prices and features on these boats ranged from actually affordable models up to models with slides from the top deck that really started to get pricey. With affordable pontoons, you mostly got what you paid for: a bargain boat with limited amenities and less powerful motors that could be used for towed water sports, but would probably leave a slalom skier wanting on the pull up. One interesting thing about the pontoons is that they throw up a relatively small wake that could be good for skiing, but could make boarders or surfers wonder what happened to their launch and wave. Pontoons seemed to be where a lot of the growth in the market was happening, to judge from the numbers on the show floor.
Bayliner
was the boat line with the most to offer in affordable towed water sports boats. I saw a couple of smaller boats with great prices, then had the local sales person take me onto their 22’6″ boats. These still managed to stay safely under the $50,000 cutoff for affordability. What I know of Bayliner is based on what the company was doing two or three decades ago when they produced boats with the build quality of 1970s Detroit. If they made it through a few seasons, you felt like you got your money’s worth. With that expectation, I was pleasantly surprised by their offerings. These boats had a lot of the fit and finish of the more expensive competitors of just a few years ago, and felt like a boat I could spend the day on without bringing along a file and screwdriver to fix everything I saw. They were nice. In fact, the Bayliners were nice enough that I wondered why more companies couldn’t produce affordable boats to fill out their ranges.
Yamaha
showed a few jet boats that could be used for pulling skiers or boarders. While I know that a jet boat has a slower hole shot – trust me, my first experiences trying to ski were being dragged along beh...