Sailboats - who is the most popular of them all?

by Nick Dewhirst on 30 Apr 2008 Mirror. mirror on the wall, who is the most popular of them all?

How many people race sailboats? Which are the most popular types of boat and individual classes? These are the questions to which Don Findlay, Simon Morgan and myself sought the answers when we heard so many unsubstantiated assertions flying about in the ISAF debate about Olympic Events last November.

Here are some examples. Lasers are raced everywhere and millions of windsurfers have been sold so we have to have those. We must have a Finn for all those heavy White men. What about the millions of smaller Asians? There are 40,000 odd 470’s sailed all over the world, so that’s ideal to widen participation.

Then to improve sailing’s spectator appeal, we have to have something high-performance and exciting. 49er is ideal. Now hang on, it looks like the experts on the Events Committee have forgotten keelboats, and that is what the stars of our sport race, so we must have a Star, and many of us around Council still race keelboats, so we are not going to exclude ourselves.

So reasons were found to include all kinds of different monohulls but because there was one less chair when the music stopped, there was no room left for anything with more than one hull. Which is why we three multi-hullers got together to separate fact from fiction.

Now our crowd wasn’t free from hyping our own case. Cats account for a quarter of all boats sold. True or false? At Sailboat there were T-shirts on sale screaming 'Cat sailors too fast for the Olympics! For us three older XXL types, we might quibble about one of the letters in fast, but otherwise wear them with pride.

Having declared our vested interests, our credentials should be mentioned. Don is a former Hobie and Prindle dealer with several decades of sales under his belt. In his retirement he became founding chairman of the UK Formula 18 Association and is now its international Secretary General. Simon probably owns more cats than anyone else in the world in his capacity as Managing Director of Wildwind Holidays in Greece. I was converted to cats in middle age, and have been busy converting others in the UK ever since as Chairman of the Sprint 15 Association and now also UKCRA.

These credentials matter because this is not a task that one can simply give to a summer vacation student or a geek with a PHD. To combat GIGO, the long and boring task of data entry needs to be done by old hands, who can assess what the data actually means.

Like most tasks, it is more complex than initially assumed, as any sailor who has ever lost a protest will know to their cost. Therefore it was first necessary to define what boats one means. Since the issue at hand was boats suitable for the Olympic Regatta, this meant that some large segments of the market can be excluded. The definition required is for adult racing sailboats and boards, which is convenient because it is difficult to quantify numbers of children’s sailboats and non-racing boats, boards and yachts.

Ours is a minority sport. Indeed all water-sports are a minority activity according to the annual Watersports and Leisure Participation Survey by the RYA in the longest-established sailing market, which is also blessed with a high ratio of coastline to population. Despite this, only 7% of the British population participate in any water sport. Of that, 2% canoe and about 1% each do small boat sailing, rowing, canal boating and motor-boating. Windsurfers and ski-bikers are about 0.5% each. Taking just those small boat sailors who actually race, the proportion drops to only 0.4% of the population. The figures for other countries may be even lower, so when anyone quotes huge numbers of anything to do with racing sail boats, they need to be carefully examined.

Historical perspective is useful to highlight the issues. A century ago gentlemen banded together, forming yacht clubs to play with rich boys toys. Since these were often successful competitive businessmen, they started competing also on the water. This raised issues of fairness so yacht clubs at coastal resorts and Great Lakes developed their own One Design Classes, e.g. XOD. Some are still lovingly maintained a century later, but numbers of such classic boats are generally small and most have rotted away.

Meanwhile the richest boys added accommodation and engines and indeed the most lucrative part of the yacht market completely dispensed with sails generations ago. Racing is for sports cars, not motor homes, so we excluded them. Certainly there are some big yacht regattas, but when one examines the results, many of the entries are for keelboat classes – no engines, no berths, maximised for racing.

For the sake of comprehensiveness, according to the UK survey, the number of people who cruise yachts is about two thirds of those who sail small boats, but there are many more people per yacht, so this represents a much smaller number of boats. As for racing, participation is 0.23% versus 0.39%. Allowing for twice as many people on a yacht as on a small sailboat, that suggests that there are four times as many active small sailboats as yachts, and this definition of yachts includes keelboats, so double it again to exclude keelboats.

The statistics suggest that yacht racing may get great publicity, but is a sport for kings, rather than popular Olympic Games. Our best guess is that, excluding racing keelboats there may have been up to 600,000 sailing yachts built, of which a third are in the United States, but we cannot guess how many still go afloat, let alone go racing, how many are scrapped, how many are restoration projects in varying states of neglect.

It was only after World War Two, that living standards rose enough for a mass leisure market to emerge. In an era when people were time-rich but income poor, cheap DIY boats constructed from marine ply became very popular, as exemplified by the French Vaurien, (literally 'Worth Nothing'). Many of these were designed for parents with children or for children on their own.

There are big claims for some classes e.g. 500,000 US Sunfish 70,000 British Mirrors or 40,000 French Vaurien. Our research validates these claims as accurate indications of plans sold and boats almost certainly built, but how many still survive, half a century later? Children grow up, boats may be sold on once or even twice, but few will have been lovingly maintained consistently. Only some 80,000 Sunfish were ever issued racing numbers. Class association membership provides a hint – just 1500 US Sunfish and 1100 UK Mirror current members. Even if that is doubled or quadrupled for cheapskates who won’t support the Associations that work for them, cumulative sales are clearly not a good indication of boats currently sailed.

Then came the fibreglass revolution starting in the Sixties. Boats are now more durable so fibreglass accounts for most of the boats still sailed, even if many may have gone so soft they are no longer competitive. Some wooden classes converted. Many more new classes were started.

As for windsurfing, by extrapolating from NMMA statistics in the US, we estimate that about 2 million boards may have been sold worldwide. However windsurfers are cheap consumables vulnerable to the next fashionable grown-up toy. Sales peaked two decades ago, so many are hanging up in garages, like mine, or have made their final journey to the local tip.

In terms of actively raced windsurfers, the numbers are tiny. In the largest market, US Sailing states 'The Formula Windsurfing class was last year's most popular class. Over 200 racers were ranked in the fastest growing class in the world.' No more need be said.

We have calculated the numbers of racing sailboats actually built by adding up the highest sail numbers for each class. The rationale is that every boat raced must have a number, usually