Some people just can’t grasp a new concept – the Luddites of the boating world.

If  you’ve been reading my blog, you know that now is a unsettled time for me.  My family is looking at trading up on a second home, but at the expense of selling Sea Badger.    Lots of emotions flying about, but it also got me reflecting on my past.

In my 50 years, I’ve had to opportunity to move about and buy several different homes.  I remember a conversation I had with an older real estate agent who had studied to be a structural engineer when in college.  As we were looking for homes, I said to him, “They just don’t build homes like they used to.”  To which he replied, “Yeah, and that’s a good thing.”  That caught me off guard.  If you look at the bones of an old home, they used real 2 x 4s that were really 2 inches by 4 inches, not the downsized stuff you find today.   They also had old growth wood, not the soft, fast growing knotty wood you find today.  They used real wood, not glulams.   How could an old home NOT be better than a new home?     You update the plumbing, you update the electrical and you end up with a better home!  I was sure of it.

Not so fast…

As my real estate/structural engineer agent explained, they built houses from experience back in the day.   The quality of the wood was better, but the structure of the house wasn’t.  Houses weren’t engineered back then, so some parts were way overbuilt and others were very poorly designed so the stresses were all wrong and the resulting structures not as safe.  He pointed out engineered ceiling trusses as an example.  Today we can have our down sized 2x4s engineered to handle more stress than a traditional roof.  They don’t look as strong, but in reality are better designed to do what is asked of a roof with less waste and weight.

Another example:  In my earlier life I was a police officer for a very well known mid-sized city in California.  Our police department was built during the 1930s as a work project and was designated a bomb shelter.  The walls were 2 feet thick of reinforced concrete, as was each of the 3 floors.  I had no doubt that it could take a direct hit from most artillery and/or conventional bombs and survive.  The problem was that this building was built less than a mile from an earthquake fault and no one thought of the shear strain of the ground moving underneath it, they just built it so survive getting hit from the top.  The result was that it was determined that to update it to modern earthquake standards was too much work and expense, so they tore it down.  Very impressively built building but poorly engineered – result was an inferior product.

So, this is a boating blog, what’s any of this got to do with boats?

I’m offering to sell Sea Badger :-(.   It is a premium aluminum boat, not to be compared to a riveted aluminum boat, or an aluminum boat that uses wood as a structural element.    Thing is, Stabicraft boats are often lighter than other better known premium aluminum boats of the same size.  As a result, some people don’t think they’re built as well.     A lot of these other boats are built by welders in a traditional manner where the thought is “thicker is  better.”  Hogwash!  If your boat is engineered correctly, you can save the weight and have a just as strong, if not stronger structure.  Plus, in the case of Stabicraft, with its unique air chambers, you can have an extremely safe boat, a very well handling boat, a better ride and get better fuel mileage.  

Stabicraft boats, like Sea Badger, are different than ‘traditional’ aluminum boats – but just as we no longer live in caves, now is the time to adjust boaters’ ideas of boating to the 21st century and see what a well designed and forward thinking boat can do.