Who is cruising the world

[mikereed100]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

There’s always going to be limitations with any dataset. I agree rallies like the ARC don’t provide a sampling of all cruising boats out there, but it is a sampling of a significant portion. At least it’s an attempt.

Looking at choke points like the Panama is probably a better sampling method. If someone can get at this dataset, that would be great. But I suspect it is a commercial product that comes at a high price.

And even using data like this is going to produce different biases. For example, there are a large percentage of cruisers who stay in one regional area (Caribbean, Mediterranean, northern Europe, east/west coasts of NA, etc…). These people are still cruisers, but most will never see the Panama Canal.

Jimmy Cornell does do a survey of world cruising boats every five years. This report only looks at numbers, not types, of boats, so it’s not getting at the same questions Zzmeyer is asking. But Cornell’s is the most global survey I’m aware of:

https://cornellsailing.com/2017/08/j...-the-boats-go/

Kaiaofmaui, I sent you a private message. Happy to chat about your Rafiki. Glad to hear you’re out there, showing that you don’t need a 42’+ boat to go cruising .

That's a fascinating map! The thing that immediately stands out is that, with a few exceptions, there are significantly fewer boats calling at almost all ports worldwide since 2000/2010. This reflects our own recent experience. We just spent the month of November in Costa Rica without seeing another cruising boat. We have spent the past month at Puerto Lucia in Ecuador and, again, we are the only cruising boat.

It is surprising to see that even in the South Pacific and Caribbean, there are significantly fewer boats than 5-10 years ago.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by mikereed100

That's a fascinating map! The thing that immediately stands out is that, with a few exceptions, there are significantly fewer boats calling at almost all ports worldwide since 2000/2010. This reflects our own recent experience. We just spent the month of November in Costa Rica without seeing another cruising boat. We have spent the past month at Puerto Lucia in Ecuador and, again, we are the only cruising boat.

It is surprising to see that even in the South Pacific and Caribbean, there are significantly fewer boats than 5-10 years ago.

Yes … I’ve been predicting this would be the trend. I believe we’ve seen the peak of cruising, and will continue to see declines. The mass aspect of it is/was driven by upper middle class affluence. As the richest generation sails off into the sunset, I expect these numbers will continue to go down.

Which is just fine by me. I’m much happier in uncrowded anchorages .

[secrabtree]

A few decades ago the Pardees wrote an article about the observed boat lengths during their circumnavigation. As I recall they observed that the average length was around 33 feet. but of only the boats that had been out longer than X years it was only somewhat less than 30 feet. (I think that X was 3 or 5.) Things have probably changed, though when I did the 1980 singlehandd transpac my Cal 39 was nearly the largest boat in the race.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by secrabtree

A few decades ago the Pardees wrote an article about the observed boat lengths during their circumnavigation. As I recall they observed that the average length was around 33 feet. but of only the boats that had been out longer than X years it was only somewhat less than 30 feet. (I think that X was 3 or 5.) Things have probably changed, though when I did the 1980 singlehandd transpac my Cal 39 was nearly the largest boat in the race.

That’s interesting. If you can find the reference for that I’d love to read it. Given that in the 70s and perhaps early 80s the BIG boats were considered to be those in the upper 30s, this could be true.

It’s been mentioned here already, but when I did an analysis of the Latitude 38 database of west coast circumnavigators, what I found was that the median boat size was somewhere around 41 feet. And remarkably, this number didn’t change much looking at pre-1970s all the way through to the present.

Of course, this was looking at LOA, and not factoring in shifting design, including the growth of cats. It could be LOA stayed the same, but size still increased. Still, it’s an interesting factoid (at least it is to me).

[Sojourner]

I'm happy to skew the numbers a hair: we three are 34, 35 and 42 years old on a 53 footer But I don't know too many people our age doing it for sure. Racing around, day sailing, yeah, but nobody can (or wants to sacrifice enough to) up and quit to sail the world too much these days without a retirement pension it seems... Indeed, if we hadn't gotten super lucky financially on a business deal (just enough for this boat and her upkeep), we couldn't either, not by a long shot. And even so we eat beans and rice a lot of nights