Boating is all about community. It’s a hugely social activity, even for those of us who go to sea to escape people, stress and noise. If the adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ is true - then it takes a collaborative industry to raise and sustain a boater.

We’ve got all the obvious components, both formal and informal:

• Boat broker
• Boatyard
• Marina
• Training school
• Chandlery
• Trusted source of advice
• Data provider
• Marine insurer
• Entities and Resources for Sailors and Marinas: MCA, RYA, EMODNet, OCT, EBI…
   

So many touchpoints for the boater to navigate.

The boater should be at the centre - the person with a dream, enthusiasm, adventure, excitement. All of those touchpoints should be super exciting, but they can also be perceived as barriers. How they are overcome can make the difference between joining our boating community for a long time or dipping their toe in the water and then moving on.

Our common aim is to make sure they fall into the former category. So why does it seem so hard and why do we lose so many people?

The marine world is old-fashioned, which is perhaps part of its appeal, but also a source of frustration. New boaters expect convenience, expect digital, expect ease. Paper charts for navigation, arriving in a marina with no booking and hoping for the best, no separate waste recycling facilities. It can be like stepping back in time.

Only today I heard from an ‘old and bold’ boater: “if you can’t read a paper chart, you have no place on the water”. I pointed out that his paper chart hadn’t been updated in years, was a snapshot in time, didn’t give tidal data, weather data, couldn’t be interrogated for more information, and didn’t fit in his pocket. The challenges are real.

Power boaters want to turn a key, slip lines and head to their destination. Sailors want to feel the wind on their face, finish their coffee and then enjoy simply sailing, often with no destination in mind. I hear this from boating instructors daily and therefore understand that even within our niche world, there are big differences.

Then there are the mental and emotional barriers. Boating has an elitist image, still. It’s perceived as expensive. Yacht clubs are considered intimidating. Marinas can be confusing. Boating has its own language, like a secret club. I could go on, but we all know the challenges. So let’s start fixing them. Let’s remember the boater is our main focus. Without them we don’t have an industry. Let’s ask ourselves: How can we make their lives easier?

My role at Savvy Navvy now is building partnerships. Partnerships are crucial because, well - we can achieve so much more together than we possibly can in isolation. If we believe otherwise, we’re really not being honest with ourselves. In a previous life I interviewed more than 10,000 people who wanted to learn to sail and race yachts. Many of whom had never set foot on a boat before but went on to sail across oceans. My 40 years working in marine, on and off the water, has been hugely rewarding and I count myself lucky daily.

In that time, I’ve seen huge changes in navigation techniques. When I say huge, I don’t mean compared to every other walk of life of course. I learnt to navigate in the 80’s using a pair of dividers, Breton plotter and paper chart. Around the same time, I was using a printed city A-Z and printed road atlas. Guess what: two of those three things are now obsolete. The Digital First drive in the UK, announced by the RYA last year, has really been driven by boaters. Certainly not by the industry. The industry is playing catch up.

So what can we learn? I’d suggest that it’s if we don’t listen to our customers - someone else will. If we don’t, as a community, encourage and support new community members, they’ll go and buy a mountain bike, or running shoes. Free time is precious and finite, and we face competition not from within but from outside the marine world. We need to be inquisitive. Ask the right questions. Be receptive to change.

Imagine a world where, from within the boaters navigation platform they can see real time berth availability, book a berth, update their ETA dynamically, check in, check out, pay the marina. Where they can find an anchorage with an advanced mooring system and reserve a buoy so as to avoid damaging seagrass beds. Where power consumption can be precisely predicted by factoring in tide and weather conditions. All these things are possible now, but not common place. Digital-First might be the new navigation mantra, but there is Digital Hesitation in other parts of our industry.

If we can, collectively, help new boaters get to their “aha” moment faster, they will be less inclined to leave.

Collaboration is key to bringing new people into boating, keeping them and having them become advocates for the next generation. And thus the cycle of sustainable boating keeps turning.