The Seattle Boat Show – 2015 Edition

This year we went pretty much all-in on the annual Boat Show experience.  We chose several boating seminars to attend across multiple days, spending quite a bit of time over two weekends at the show, and even paid for some Boat Show U classes.  Unfortunately, due to a death in the family we actually missed some of the seminars and one Boat Show U class that we had originally scheduled to attend.

The Seattle Boat Show is pretty much the same each year, but we’ve never done any of the extras before nor attended for more than one day.  My first experience with the free ‘seminars’ reminded me of Morgan Spurlock’s “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold“.  For example, We were really interested in hearing some insight from John and Amanda Neal of Mahina Expedition, but the hour-long session was really just a list of the 20 items that should be on your list of things you need to research, (with no actual information) with advertisements mixed in for their books, their full day seminar, and products you can buy through West Marine.  I feel like they were simply advertising their services while also being sponsored by West Marine to do so, which seems very strange to me.  The idea of ‘sponsorship’ to me implies that you would normally be charging for the service you are providing but the sponsor is paying you instead.  But I don’t normally pay to hear advertisements nor do most people I suspect.  So it just felt wrong.

The other boating seminars we went to were similarly sponsored, though not quite as over the top as the Neals.

The Boat Show U classes were each 3+ hours long and cost some money to attend.  These were also sponsored but there was very little discussion beyond an initial mention of the sponsorship and what service they provide.  We made it to three of our four pre-paid classes, focusing on anchoring, docking, reading charts, and weather forecasting.  As expected, Nigel Calder was pretty fantastic, and our anchoring/docking class with Ace Spragg was great because she explained things clearly and used props.  Nigel’s sections on docking and anchoring built on what we heard from Ace, and added some great information about types of anchors and chain choices.  Nigel’s section on chart accuracy was eye-opening as well.

By the way, if you don’t already have them, I highly recommend Nigel Calder’s books.  I personally own and really like both “Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual” and “Marine Diesel Engines“.

Our third class was on weather forecasting taught by Lee Chesneau.  Lee clearly knows pretty much everything there is to know about weather and can forecast wind and sea conditions in about 30 seconds by looking at pretty much any of the various NOAA charts.  He teaches 2 and 5 day classes on weather forecasting, the latter for commercial skippers and I’m sure his classes are great.   However, while I did learn a lot in our 3 hour session, I think he’d be better off changing the way he handles the 3 hour version of his training.  Basically he took 2-5 days of content and tried to compress it down to the 3 hours he had available.  This left my head spinning quite a bit, wondering if I even understood what was being presented and wishing for a pre-course on weather basics.  It might be better to take 3 hours of instruction out of the larger class and just teach that.  It could be a good lead-in to taking the rest of the classes assuming it was done well.  All-in-all it was still valuable and his website (www.weatherbylee.com) has tons of information including the actual NOAA charts you need to forecast the weather for your passages.

Displaying how small our world is, while chatting with an insurance broker at the show, who was one of the sponsors for the Boat Show U classes, I found out he was the actual delivery skipper who sailed our boat from Portland to Seattle before we purchased her.  Sort of crazy coincidence.

Also, since a water maker is on our list of big-ticket items over the next couple years, we spent some time walking around the show talking to vendors.  I had fairly lengthy discussions with every water maker vendor I found and will be writing up some information on what I learned in the near future.

Since we already have a boat, we spent very little time looking at boats, and skipped the Boats Afloat portion of the show at Lake Union.