Boat sellers were all smiles on Sunday as the Seattle Boat Show at Shilshole Bay Marina wrapped up.

The sun was out. The crowds were good. And for the first time since the economy tanked, people were doing more than looking at boats: they were actually buying.

“We haven’t had a boat show like this in a long time,” said Bob Pound, manager of Sundance Yacht Sales & Moorage’s Lake Union location. “We weren’t sure about it on Wednesday, but now we are smiling.”

During the course of the four-day sales event at Shilshole Bay Marina, Sundance landed about 20 deals, mostly for powerboats in the 33-foot to 62-foot range, Pound said. Other dealers also reported strong buyer interest and offers on both new and used boats.

The Northwest Marine Trade Association (NMTA), which re-launched the summer show at Shilshole after a four-year hiatus while the marina was being renovated, estimated more than 7,000 people attended the event.

Potential buyers stroll the docks at Shilshole Bay Marina on Sunday, the last day of the boat show.

Those numbers met expectations and helped ease the pain from what many dealers and brokers considered a particularly dismal boat show in January and the sluggish sales that followed this year.

“We are getting the flavor that the fear of the economy is starting to turn,” said Kjell Lyso, a broker with Admiralty Yacht Sales, which sold at least two Catalina sailboats over the weekend. “Last year, we had a lot of people in the position to buy, but who didn’t want to touch their nest eggs.”

The Shilshole boat show featured about 180 new and used boats for sale, ranging in size from 14 to 74 feet—and plenty of great deals for buyers, said John Thorburn, the NMTA’s director of marketing and communications.

The selection and the sense that prices weren’t going to get any better brought Will and Ann Bruce to the show. The Woodinville couple is in the market for a powerboat in the 42-foot range and saw two or three that caught their attention.

“The housing market is picking up and that’s why we’re out here,” said Will Bruce, who runs a residential real estate company. “We are on the cusp (of an economic recovery) and the prices are right. Next year, it might be a different story.”

The four-day boat show drew more than 7,000 people, exceeding attendance goals for the event.

The annual floating boat show was displaced during Shilshole Bay Marina’s lengthy renovation. In the interim, the NMTA merged its August show with the Northwest Yacht Brokers Association’s Boats Afloat show, held on Lake Union each September. In response to demand from NMTA members, the association decided to return the August show to Shilshole for its 33rd run.

Despite the optomism from buyers and sellers at the show, the industry still faces a long road to recovery. Recently released figures for Washington showed that boat sales remained slow overall in the second quarter of the year, although there are encouraging signs.

New boat sales were sluggish, declining 33 percent over the second quarter of 2008 in the number of boats sold. But the rate of decrease slowed from the first quarter of this year, when new boat sales were down more than 56 percent.

Used boats sales fared much better, with a drop of 6.6 percent in the number of boats sold, compared with a decline of 27.5 percent during the first quarter of the year—a sign that the pent-up consumer demand brokers and dealers have been waiting for may finally be starting to materialize.

Under the summer sun on Sunday, Pound summed up the new optimism of buyers and brokers simply.

“It’s all about consumer confidence,” he said.

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