Friday, April 26, 2013

The demographics of cruising associations

Recently I went down to Limehouse Basin (above) to visit the Cruising Association for a talk by Matt Rutherford on his solo non-stop circumnavigation of the Americas.

There was one thing that struck me quite strongly about that evening: how old the audience was.

I'm not youngster but I was almost certainly below the mean age of those there, and it was particularly noticeable given how young Matt was - or at least relatively.

And it raised a couple of questions:
  • Was the audience representative of the CA in general?
  • Have cruising associations always been for those in their "prime of life"? - maybe because yacht owning involves a degree of both wealth and experience.
  • If not when was it that cruising associations involved more young people?
  • Does it matter?
  • If so how could they widen their appeal?

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3 comments:

  1. Tillerman2:09 pm

    Good question. I have never joined a cruising association.

    Maybe when I'm older I might feel that I'm too old for Laser racing and then I might do some cruising.

    And then when I feel I'm too old for cruising I might join a cruising association.

    Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

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  2. JP2:50 pm

    Surely shome mistake as its well known that Tillerman is aiming to "die on his Laser"?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tillerman3:57 pm

    I plead guilty to inconsistency and ask for 362,873 other offences to be taken into consideration.

    ReplyDelete