Sailor's Delight

The pleasure-boat industry climbed over the $1 billion mark for the first time in 1954. Last week, as boatbuilders opened the biggest national Motor Boat Show in history, the outlook for 1955 was even better. On opening night alone, some 25,000 fans jammed into New York City's Kingsbridge Armory to see 380 boats and thousands of gadgets from 233 exhibitors.

The biggest boat in the show was a 51-ft. Wheeler cruiser with twin 200-h.p. diesels, a complete electric galley, two showers, and staterooms for eight. It was sold for $88,000 to John Sparler of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a paper executive. The flashiest boat was Century Boat Co.'s chrome-trimmed, 55-m.p.h. Coronado speedboat, with wrap-around windshield and a 285-h.p. Cadillac V-8 engine. Ten minutes after the doors opened, Radu Irimescu, onetime Rumanian Minister to the U.S., who now works for Floyd Odium's Atlas Corp., snapped it up for about $5,500.

Outboard & Inboard. But the heaviest buying was in the vast array of smaller inboard cruisers, outboards and utility runabouts. Despite increasing costs, boatmakers have held prices to last year's level, and the show had something for every bankroll. Besides the inboard cruisers, twelve boatyards showed off new, inexpensive, outboard cabin cruisers at prices between $1,300 and $2,500. The cruisers, up to 23 ft. long, can sleep two, do 20 m.p.h. with two motors on the stern. For penny-pinching do-it-yourselfers, who knocked together 30% of the 300,000 pleasure boats built in the U.S. last year, there are 400 complete boat kits to make everything from 8-ft. prams to 23-ft. cruisers at about 50% less than the same boat would cost readymade.

Many of the new outboards had electric starters and mufflers and vibration-free mountings that sharply cut their noise. Evinrude has a new tilt-compensator that keeps the engine from bouncing against the back of the boat when the power is cut suddenly. Scott-Atwater has equipped all its engines, from 5 h.p. to 30 h.p., with its Bail-a-matic device, which bails the boat automatically as long as the engine is running.

Beeps for the Deeps. For sailboat skippers, the biggest eye-catcher was Luders Marine Construction Co.'s racy 40-ft. sloop, made from molded mahogany plywood, the biggest molded plywood hull yet made. Price: $38,500. For cruising yachtsmen, both power and sail, the electronics industry had some new gadgets. Both RCA and Raytheon displayed new lightweight radar and sonar sets that could search out schools of fish as well as tell the precise depth of the water. Bendix even has a radar set for close-in navigating that shows objects as near as 25 ft.

Prices on the new radar sets were as low as $3,200 (sonar: $475), still too steep for the average yachtsman. But with 4,500,000 U.S. boatowners on the waterways in 1954, there was hope that mass production for the mass market would eventually permit boatowners to navigate anywhere in any weather, with almost as many beeping, pinging gadgets on their craft as on the Queen Mary.

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