Food for the used boat market...
All of this boat destruction (remember last week's picture of the boatyard in the Cayman Islands with all of the boats piled up on each other?) has me thinking about what happens in the used boat market. With automobiles, there's a steady replacement of the fleet as the bodies and engines wear out. With sailboats, one would think that there would be little attrition because the hulls can last a long time and have hardware upgraded constantly. Indeed, most of the boats on their moorings near mine seem to be over 20 years old (and mine is a 1987). Yet these storms must create some kind of buyer's market for those willing to do the simpler kind of repairs to damaged boats. I wonder just how many boats are a total loss after each of these storms, or how much attrition is there in the fleet? Do the prices of new boats get held down by a healthy supply of old boats, or are the numbers of old boats held down by storm attrition? I suppose people in the industry might know these things and tell us if they aren't trade secrets...
