Having hung with a bunch of sailors most of my life, I’ve found them generally to have ample, energetic, and definite opinions about what is right and wrong with their sport and their pastime. When people are passionate about something, conversations are almost always charged. This discussion thread, in response to data supporting the book Saving Sailing published on the website SailingAnarchy, did not disappoint. It is loaded with great ideas, valuable perspectives, some legitimate anger and frustration about the state of sailing affairs and a few questions about the post.

So here I will summarize the research that was conducted and that informs the book Saving Sailing.

To start, note that I am a researcher by trade. I conduct qualitative research for leaders of F500 companies and help them implement better research practices. I’ve made my living this way for more than 10 years. So I have been careful and professional in my collection and analysis methods.

But the research for this book was mostly a labor of love.

It started eight years ago as part of a probono effort to assist regional sailing clubs and our area racing organizing authority to understand a drop-off in participation in racing. Over about three years, I surveyed and polled about 700 sailors within a 250 mile radius of my home port -- Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and fed the information back to club leaders around the lakes so that they could make decisions about schedules and programming. The last of those surveys was discussed on SA at this thread a few years ago.

Then in 2006, the research effort morphed into something much larger. I (and a team from my firm) spread out and gathered the perspectives of sailors from the US, Canada, hotspots in Western and Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In the course of about three years, we conducted comprehensive research to understand sailor’s motivations, backgrounds, perspectives and their aspirations. We used many methods -- face to face discussions, interviews, observations and surveys. I attended shows all over the US and in Europe. We polled for basic data like years of experience and time invested. We used proven methods: pilots followed by structured interviews; both quantitative (scored) questions, and open-ended questions with subsequent classification of verbatim responses. We were careful to make certain that our sample would include the voices of cruisers and racers, retirees and kids, pros and amateurs, veterans and newcomers, and a special pool of wannabes. To do all this work, we had the support of a dozen sailing media organizations -- magazines, websites and associations in 10 countries, including some of the largest publications in the U.S.. By the time we were done collecting primary data, we had spoken with thousands of sailors worldwide, but then trimmed it to only include the 1185 in the U.S. as our basis, since the book would focus there.

Then we landed on some terrific supplemental data. US Sailing surveys its affiliate clubs and training centers. We focused on the most recent 2007 report. And we got our hands on participation data from Sailboats, Inc, the company that publishes SailingWorld and CruisingWorld magazines about overall participation. We tested our assumptions with some key industry insiders: people at Harken, Ronstan, Laser Performance, West Marine, North Sails and Henry Lloyd. Then to understand larger demographic trends, we looked to the census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and to understand recreation trends, we cited work from the company American Sports Data, and from the the book Trends on Outdoor, Recreation and Tourism, by Gartner and Lime.

We have high confidence that our survey data represents the US population based on two factors: the careful selection and broad range of the sources, and the large number of respondents (against the number of sailors overall, about 2.6M in the US). It also tracks with all of our other interviewing, and with data collected from industry-types.

Finally, the book idea was hatched after most of the research work was done. There was a moment at which I realized that we had compiled a rich-enough data-set to answer lot’s of questions and, quite possibly, to solve some big, systemic problems.

So that is what I hope that the book will do. You can expect a narrative rich with sailing stories salted with numbers and carefully sourced. It uses facts to support conclusions, substantial data to suggest trends. But, in order to avoid boring us all with tables, chart and statistics, it uses sailor’s actual experiences to show why sailing deserves to be saved, and what can be done to save it.

Finally, I’m very happy to share insights with anyone that asks. Feel free to IM or email anytime.

-ndh (nickhayes@savingsailing.com)