I place a high level of importance on patio happy hours in the backyard on pleasant weather evenings. If you follow me on Facebook, the pictures I post showing what music I am listening to on the iPad staged next to a robust adult beverage likely get tiresome. I’m a man of simple pleasures. Sorry, not sorry.

At some point each summer, those patio sessions end abruptly thanks to Maryland’s steamy, mosquito-ridden nights. My neighbors and I retreat to the air conditioning while joking: “It’s all downhill from here. See you in September.”

The only good thing about summer’s most brutal days is that they remind me about crabbing with my father. We’re annoyingly serious about crabbing here on Chesapeake Bay, and we don’t let the weather get in the way of our boating.

As I once wrote about being out on the boat with Dad: “It’s early one sweltering evening in 1977 as the sun begins to dip below the tree line. Beneath a patio light that’s under attack from a hundred buzzing insects, my father and I sit surrounded by 1,000 feet of braided nylon line, a couple of wooden bushel baskets, a 25-gallon tub of brine, and 30 pounds of very dead and extremely odiferous salted eels. My father sips a coffee-mug martini with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and ties loops in the line while I dice up pieces of eel and slip them in the openings. By the time we finish baiting all 1,000 feet of line, we collectively smell of brined eel, sweat and gin. Our legs are peppered with itchy red bumps inflicted by biting flies. My mother despised this routine. My father and I relished it.”

For some reason, out on the boat, we never lost our desire to stay outside. And we weren’t even in a setting as nice as my backyard patio. We were aboard a well- neglected, 12-foot skiff that embedded shards of fiberglass in your thighs every time you moved, and the boat nearly split in half during one outing.

The great thing about boating is that newcomers to our sport don’t have to be flush with cash to start creating memories like this of their own. Affordability is a point that I think we too often miss in our messaging as an industry.

While we saw a massive influx of new boaters during the pandemic, many of them have already moved on, as the data shows in our By the Numbers report on Page 56. Could we have kept them with better messaging about affordability?

Maybe.

The price of entry for my father was the cost of a beat-up, 12-foot Ted Williams skiff made mostly of chopped fiberglass and powered by a cantankerous, smoke-belching, Chrysler-built 2-stroke outboard. We netted countless bushels of crabs and enjoyed an infinite number of grilled fluke dinners from her icebox. We identified dozens of new species of waterbirds while relaxing in her. We cemented memories that my dad and I shared for the next 30 years.

From those humble beginnings, he ended up owning several boats during his lifetime, including a couple of fishy center consoles and a 37-foot sailboat that he and my stepmother sailed up and down Chesapeake Bay. They eventually used it to explore the length of the Intracoastal Waterway. That small, affordable family skiff we enjoyed in the early days ended up enriching numerous marinas, tackle shops, boatyards, sailmakers and other industry businesses throughout my dad’s lifetime.

I carried on as well, purchasing neglected, dumpster-fire sailboats that I fixed up to cruise and live aboard. When those boats disappeared into the ether, I turned to a local boat club, another friendly and affordable boating option.

There is certainly nothing wrong with buying a new boat, but I believe we can welcome even more folks to the water by educating them about affordable alternatives, such as used boats, boat clubs, charters and more. Many of these people will eventually work their way up the ownership ladder into larger, longer-distance cruising boats.

Our collective goal should be to get these folks off their porches, and then to keep them out on the water. Maybe don’t mention the mosquitoes, but absolutely do talk more about affordable options. It’s a great way to create the right kind of buzz on hot summer nights. 

This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue.