Seattle Boat Show Blog

Singing in the rain? Brokers say the buyers are finally here

by Deborah Bach on 30/01/10 at 7:29 pm

Gazing around him as the rain came down Saturday afternoon, Bob Berglund couldn’t have looked happier.

“Cruddy weather’s great. These are boaters,” said a smiling Berglund, motioning to the people walking the docks on Lake Union at the outdoor portion of the Seattle Boat Show.

The owners of NW Yachtnet were all smiles today, a marked difference from the gloom of last year's show.

“These aren’t people who are sitting at home bored, going, ‘What do you want to do today?’ I guarantee you, 80 percent of these people were boaters,” said Berglund, the co-owner of Tacoma brokerage NW Yachtnet.

Indeed, the chill and damp didn’t seem much of a deterrent to the crowds thronging the docks at Chandler’s Cove on the second day of the boat show, talking with brokers, touring boats and checking out the indoor displays of marine products and services.

The mood was a marked contrast to last year’s show, when brokers put on a brave face and made the best of it, despite lackluster sales at a time when the stock market was in freefall and unemployment rates were continuing to rise.

Though Saturday was only the second day of the show, which runs through Feb. 6, Kurt Kingman, Berglund’s business partner, said the event got off to a strong start with high attendance on Friday. Showgoers he’d talked with seem engaged and interested in buying, Kingman said.

“It seems like there’s pretty serious interest,” he said. “It’s feeling good.”

Down the dock, brothers Kent and Darin Calderwood and friend James O’Dwyer, from North Vancouver, B.C., were touring a Nordhavn. The trio came to the Seattle show, they said, because the Vancouver Boat Show was canceled this year.

A broker at Blackfish Marine waits in the rain for the next potential buyer.

They’d visited the indoor portion of the show at Qwest Field Event Center in SoDo and taken the show’s free shuttle up to Lake Union. They said the indoor show has larger boats than the Vancouver show typically has, and there were more boats on display on Lake Union than at the Vancouver show. O’Dwyer was impressed by both the $12 show ticket price and the variety of boats on display.

“It’s nice stuff,” he said. “It’s a really good cross-section.”

At the show office, Bonnie Bergquist, executive director of the Northwest Yacht Brokers Association, said attendance is up noticeably over last year and has so far included a high number of Canadians and showgoers who purchased multi-day passes.

“The five-day passes have been really popular,” she said. “We might need to print more of them.”

Bergquist said several boat brokers recorded first-day boat sales. Overall, she said, brokers are feeling optimistic about the prospects for the show, which the industry is hoping will signal a turnaround for the region’s marine industry after a prolonged, painful recession.

“They really needed this,” she said. “Last year was really, really difficult. I think the economy has started to turn around enough for it to make a difference.”