Just returned from the Annapolis Sailboat Show. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good: A fantastic weekend. I’m preparing my Tanton 43 for a serious ocean voyage, and the best part was having real experts at the booths who could answer tough technical questions. The people, yachts, and setting were excellent. The rest was depressing. I’ve attended this show since the ’90s, and it keeps shrinking. It’s still substantial, with specialists in almost every field, but the depth of competition is disappearing. Only three diesel manufacturers had dedicated booths. Major names like Volvo Penta and Westerbeke were absent. My favorite, Beta Marine, displayed four engines, but hardly its full lineup. Mercury and Suzuki were missing, too, although new electric outboard brands showed up. The clientele looked far wealthier than 30 years ago. The middle class has either left sailing or can no longer afford major upgrades to aging boats. The ugly: Sailboat sales are tanking. Of the 40,000+ new boats sold in the wealthiest country on Earth last year, fewer than 400 were sailboats. Used prices are collapsing, too. Weeks ago I shared one of my five dream yachts, now listed for $89,000. A few years back it would have commanded hundreds of thousands. I’ve seen gorgeous, well-maintained bluewater yachts from the ’70s through ’90s for $20,000–$30,000, and newer yachts from the 2000s and 2010s for $60,000–$80,000 if you know where to look. Why? Insurance restrictions, marinas filled by the COVID buying boom, rising costs, and fewer people with time to learn to sail. Those with spare time increasingly prefer turning a key on a powerboat and going. Catamarans are propping up the market, but insurance and dockage for that beam are outrageous. With two big engines and tiny sails, many feel more like powerboats with masts. But the deeper problem is design. Everything looks dated. We are LONG overdue for a revolution. 1960s: Fiberglass transforms boatbuilding. 1970s: Robert Perry and others develop capable new offshore hulls. 1980s: Taiwanese yards deliver gorgeous teak interiors and craftsmanship. 1990s: Racing innovations make cruising boats faster. 2000s: Wide sterns create generous deck space. 2010s: Lighter interiors and large windows make boats faster, brighter, roomier. Since then? Precious little. I remember visiting Disney in the ’90s in our Ford Taurus. Its rounded windows and digital dashboard felt futuristic, but Tomorrowland looked decades old. My dad called it “the future from the ’70s.” That’s exactly how this boat show felt. Even multimillion-dollar Swans and Oysters had rounded edges, ugly oversized windows, and millennial-gray interiors. Giant screens and TVs everywhere, as if we go sailing for MORE screen time. Those windows were exciting 15 years ago. Now LEDs can brighten a cabin without turning it into a glass box. Who wants to spend a million dollars on a floating Hilton Home2 Suites? I boarded a $2.5 million yacht with flimsy plastic hatches that looked ready to blow out in the first 20-foot wave. When I challenged the salesman, he lectured me about eco-friendly materials and saving diesel through weight reduction. 🙄 Give us fast, computer-designed hulls, not cost-cutting eco-trash dressed up in six shades of gray. The cure is simple: Use modern engineering to build boats that are rugged, fast, and classically beautiful. We don’t want plastic. We want brass. Figure out how to 3D-print it. We don’t want an iPad holder. Give us a proper place for a sextant. We don’t want a 60-inch TV. Give us a better dodger, built with advanced clear materials, so we can sit outside, protected, and enjoy the actual ocean. Stop designing floating hotel rooms. Start building yachts that make people dream of going to sea. Harden the lines, engineer quality, lower the cost of luxury, use natural instead of eco materials. Make a model nornies can afford. Call me. I’ll design the next gen yacht!

Pork belly and butter. Yum.

Everyone agrees that difficult hard times make you stronger. Most agree that the most difficult times in our lives were the happiest. Why doesn’t anyone see that marriage is hard for a reason? Because it makes you stronger and happier.

“A woman wondering if they can do better than her current husband, the answer is always yes." This might be the most evil thing I’m seen all month. Your wife cannot find someone better than you. You cannot find someone better than your wife. Can you find someone smarter, better looking, smarter or richer? To have sex with? Probably. To build a life with? Maybe. Big if. But the entire point of marriage is a loving stable platform ordered toward your mutual good and that of your children. Marriage is not about happiness. It’s for providing the platform to which you can become happy and much much more. And this is a very dangerous time in world history to get divorced. Divorce seems like a safe option because we just had the greatest period of wealth, peace and stability the world has ever seen. But the world without peace, wealth and stability is a very dangerous and hostile place. For both men and women. I therefore find it ironic that the people on the left who keep crying the sky is falling are the very ones promoting divorce. If the sky truly is falling then you need to stabilize the foundation of your life and repair that leaking roof NOW. Not abandon it. If the sky isn’t falling then the best you can do is reset the clock and start rebuilding that foundation and house with someone else. What they won’t tell you is that’s a lot of work. You have to be a idiot to want to start from scratch in middle age. I don’t want to do that. Building is hard. I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor and wealth and knowledge from the shelter of a loving marriage that sure as hell ain’t perfect but has depth and richness and great big load bearing beams we carved out of oak and hauled into place with great sweat, work and tears. Life is too short to abandon all you built and start over with someone who is needy too.

And what happens if Elissa and friends organize a national security incident that forces Trump’s hand just so they can nail him? Of course a former CIA spook would never ever do something like that.

Nothing angers me more than US Merchant Mariners being suffocated by red tape. What’s worse is this was the USCG’s response to the President’s Maritime Action Plan. Instead it has made the problems much worse. Doesn’t matter how many new ships we build or how much money the Navy offers us to crew MSC ships if nobody can complete the USCG paperwork to crew them.