A few things to think about
:
A) Most issues/problems do NOT have only one factor driving them, so no one will ever come up with "The Reason" that sailing is declining. There are obviously multiple reasons.
B) As the owner of a wooden
boat, I can tell you that they die of old age much more quickly than
fiberglass. In the "glory years" of small sailboats tens of thousands of boats were built of
fiberglass and unlike their wooden predecessors they didn't
rot away. Thus, we have a glut of great boats from that era still available to anyone who wishes to fix them up for a tiny fraction of the cost of a
new boat.
C) The
current rate of obesity in the United States is 35% amongst young adults and over 42% amounts adults. It is really hard to sail if you're obese. Let's face it, we're a country that is steadily getting fatter and more out of shape. Sailing is not obese friendly, as many boats have heads which one simply can't fit into if they are over large. (Source:
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html)
D) Automobiles have become so complex that no one can fix their own, if it was built after about 1990. This has eliminated what used to serve as basic
training for young people who used to
work on their own cars. That translates into sailors who don't know much about mechanical things. Bad for cruising.
E) People have become rather irrationally focused on
safety. As a result, many boats which used to be "normal" are now viewed as "unsafe" because they don't have all manner of extra
safety gear.
F) The attention span of the typical American is shrinking. There's a good BBC piece debunking the claim that it's only 8 seconds. But how long is it between people checking their
phone for social media, or a post on Cruiser's Forum? When people hear I spent 18 days sailing from S.
California to the
Marquesas they look at me like I must be mad. They do the same thing when they find out we've spent 30 days hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains. "What do you do to stay in touch? Sat
phone?" (Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790)
G) Long distance sailing can be hard work on a small
budget. As a result, most folks wait until they can afford a bigger
budget and their
kids are gone. As one resident of the Tuamotus once said: "Why do you all wait until you're old to travel? Why not go when you're young and strong?" my response was: "We're too attached to our comforts and that costs
money."
Finally, I'll just point out that the period after World War 2 was an economic anomaly. The average American was richer then than at any time before or after. Why? Well, we were the only major economy that didn't have its industrial infrastructure bombed into rubble. Life was good, pay was good, then competition started to show up in the '70s and '80s. Since then, it's been tougher and it will continue to get tougher as other countries have rebuilt since the war. As a result, viewing anything with the relatively short focus on the last 50 years is absurd. Much of our angst about a number of topics is based on the fallacious assumption that the boom years from 1950 to 1980 were the "normal" rather than the exception that they clearly were.