Well, we went to the show -- wow. More money floating on the water in Newport than I'll ever see in my lifetime. It was a lot of fun, a big show, good ratio of sail to power (pretty balanced I thought power/sail, with both the boats on display and the vendors). Talk about some spectacular boats, and all beautiful to see. Newport is always fun, and it took a good couple days to see the entire show in detail. There were some moments of incredible snobbiness. I understand having hundreds (thousands?) of people tromping all over brand new boats can really take a toll, scratch railings, fingerprints all over the chrome and glass, little kids pushing switches and buttons -- but if you don't want browsers on your boat, then why the heck do you take it to a huge boat show? Taking off shoes, of course, that's only polite -- but filing an application to see the boat? Setting an appointment? Getting "permission?" I know, dealers want to harvest buyer contact info and only have potential buyers on board and not waste time with casual browsers, but at times it got really obnoxious. The worst of all, by far, was the Krogen Express rep. It was a beautiful boat, so impressive, but she was so obnoxious and elitist and obviously annoyed with all the smelly, unwashed people coming through that she almost made me laugh. In the few minutes I was on board she got into outright arguments with two people -- once because somebody opened a cabinet door even though there was a placard on the bed that told people not to (it was an occupied boat, loaned to the dealer by the owner for the show, so the owner had clothes in the cabinets). In the other argument, a browser took her shoes off on the dock rather than placing her shoes on the designated mat on the boat's aft deck. Well, the sales rep was using the array of shoes on deck to maintain a count of the people on board. She almost did a bouncer/law-enforcement kind of move to keep the elderly lady off the boat unless her shoes were placed in the proper place. The old lady told her she was ridiculous and to get out of the way, she was not going to move her shoes three feet so Ms. OCD Snob Sales Rep could maintain a foot count from only the properly designated on-board shoe pile. It was hilarious -- and if I ever do win the Powerball, even if they are spectacular boats, I will never, ever buy a Krogen Express as long as I live because of that sales rep. I watched her talk to other people as if they were worms, truly awful.
But even the snob moments were kind of amusing, and overall we had a great time. Came home with enough vendor info to exhaust my entire financial portfolio five times over. Kind of unexpectedly our favorite boat (in our real-world, six-figure, rather than the seven or eight figure, price range) was a 2014 Carver 40. We might wait a few years and then shop around for one of those, we really liked the layout and style -- although our '96 Mainship 37 outweighs that boat by around three or four tons dry, so it makes me wonder about how solidly they're building Carvers lately and how durable they'd be. We even ran into a couple yacht club neighbors from our home marina in South Dakota, small world. It was great fun and we're glad we went. Dinner on the outdoor, upstairs deck at Midtown Oyster Bar, always so good. It was a blast.
