The Boat Show

I forgot to talk about the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show. Wow. Hard to find the words. First of all it was warm. Very warm for the first few days then we had something of a little hurricane or so it seemed to me. Wind whirling and swirling and the ocean looking dark and frothy. It was exciting! There was so much water and the boat show tents were set up on parking lots that the water sloshed into the tents causing havoc! Exciting!!

The boat show can be separated into three parts: 1) the show itself, 2) reviewing and buying stuff at the show, and 3) eating and drinking around the show. So much stimulation in one week it is hard to describe.

The show itself was really, really big and over the top opulent. Actually with the rest of the country having difficult times it was embarrassing. Or rather folks at the show should have been embarrassed. I was. There were lots and lots of huge boats for sale. You could see them but not go on them without presenting credentials, essentially a bank statement. We snuck on an 85" SunSeeker - a lovely boat with amazing layout. My favorite though was the 55" Carver with the new design. It was amazing. I could really see us on that boat... if we had $750k that is.

Kermit and I spend three days walking around and trying stuff out. We had a shopping list with competitive prices so Kermit could talk price when we found the stuff we wanted. Our primary mission was electronics to replace the electronics on our boat that was destroyed by a lucky lightening bolt in September. The show has lots of huge tents in a really huge parking lot in which companies display any number of products. Actually just about anything you could want for a boat of any size is displayed in one of the tents. So we found the electronics tent and spent hours it seems at the Garmin booth. Garmin had a huge booth with almost every model on display. We played with a bunch and selected the 5012 touchscreen with integrated radar, AIS, and cruise control.

Then we had to negotiate a deal with some vendor because of course Garmin does not sell directly to consumers. We ended up purchasing it for about a 15% discount from West Marine. How it works at the boat show is you do your shopping then you go to West Marine and the nice folks find the price and give you a "boat show discount" which is about 15% off. So when we got to West Marine after shopping for three days, the totals were astounding!! It gave me heart palpitations to make such large purchases!!! But we have a budget and mostly bought things that were on our shopping lists so I guess it was ok.

We already had a proposal from a Cleveland company to purchase the Garmin 4012 gps version with all the stuff so we could price compare. We bought the stuff from West Marine then Kermit had discussions with the Cleveland folks. He really wanted to do business with a local NE Ohio firm so we ended up paying a little more, bought it from the Cleveland folks, and ended up returning the merchandise to West Marine.

This happened all week. We returned some things and kept others. We got a new stove to replace the broken stove plus some dishes that will probably go back.

The third way to consider the boat show is the entertainment. We were traveling with some great folks, especially Ron and Julie who function as cruise directors. We had interesting activities every day and ate well, usually with a crowd of interesting folks. The best part was the boat ride on the first day. Ron rented a 20" boat and we tootled around Ft. Lauderdale. We saw the boat show from the water which was cool. In order to take the boat out to the channel, the boat show folks had to move a section of the walkways, which made us feel very important!

Would I go back? No. But did I enjoy the trip? Yes. We had fun with the crowd we traveled with. We ate well, and certainly the boat show was entertaining.