I spent time with Sandoval at the American Boating Congress two weeks ago, where we kicked around a number of issues during a Recreational Boating Leadership Council meeting. Sandoval is vice chairman of the RBLC’s diversity committee.

Sandoval, 48, is on the board of the Yacht Brokers Association of America and the Chicago Yacht Club, where he is chairman of the club’s venerable Race to Mackinac.

Sandoval is the subject of an in-depth Q&A in the June issue of Trade Only. One topic that does not appear in the magazine interview involves the key role that kids play in the future growth of boating.

Sandoval’s daughter Sofia (left) and Olivia Buoscio, his business partner’s daughter.

I asked Sandoval, who is the father of a 4- and a 6-year-old, to discuss the issue. How can we make it easier, for instance, for a kid sailing an Optimist dinghy today to be sailing a 34-footer 20 years from now? How do we attract younger buyers? And how do we bring younger people into the industry?

His answer is thought-provoking:

I can’t begin to emphasize how important this is. People that know me well at my yacht club or in the Lake Michigan sailing community know how passionate I am about this topic. When we bought the dealership, we were in our late 30s. In our industry we were often looked at as “kids.”

As we attended boat shows, we started noticing a trend. Everyone was our parents’ age or older. We surveyed our customer base and identified the mean age of our buyers to be about 58. Doing quick math, we realized that, at this rate, in a couple of decades many of these boaters might be out of the sport with no new generation behind them.

This was a huge business problem. It might have been because of where we are in life — younger families, active lifestyles — but little by little we started to change how we locally marketed the sport in the imagery or wording for our hard-copy ads and in conversations with buyers. We started attracting a lot of younger buyers — sailors who, like us, were Generation Xers that had kids or younger families. We started to see the median age decline for our buyers.

The lesson in this is that you attract what you are and who you are. For the sport of sailing to remain pertinent, we need to continue to involve young people in the industry at all parts. We need to continue to incorporate their perspective. The “gray-haired” group can’t be the only ones making the design decisions.

Sandoval is an avid sailboat racer.

Taking it to another level: A little-known fact about sailboat racers is that for every racing boat sold there are about four to five cruising boats sold. Sailboat racing is a subsegment of a broader grouping, each important to the growth of the overall sport of sailing. Sailboat racing is undergoing its own transition and has experienced a decline in participation of its own.

There are many yacht club-driven efforts to engage more youth through community sailing centers and activities that nudge cruisers into the racing subculture. Those need to continue. Our goal needs to be to get more people out on the water and using their boats. The next generation of sailboat racers will come out of that group of boaters. Exposing them to the water early in life is the key.

I recently showed a client from the East Coast a boat we were representing. In the course of our conversation during his visit, he indicated that he had done some research on my background and wanted to ask about some of the initiatives I had seen be successful locally for recruiting younger people to the sport. He also serves on the board at his yacht club. I shared some of the statistics and what our club has done locally to recruit and retain a younger member base. There are a lot of new ideas being implemented around the country.

One of the challenges that our club places on our board of directors is to visit other yacht clubs across the country. As I travel for various reasons, I try to do that and meet with colleagues that are members at those clubs and bring some of those ideas back, especially the ones involving youth sailing programs.

If you dig past the accident information you will eventually find (starting on Page 64) the boat registration data for last year. And those figures also produced something of a surprise. After significant declines of more than 250,000 registered boats in 2010 and 2011, the number slowed in 2012 to just 72,000 boats, leaving the total number of registered boats at 12.1 million.

I was not alone in expecting the total to come in below 12 million, which would have taken us back to 1996 levels. What caused the exodus to slow? Are we seeing a turn off the bottom, where significant numbers of folks are pulling their boats out of garages or backyards, taking the covers off and reregistering them? Are boaters who were chased to the sidelines by the recession finally feeling confident enough to say “I want to get back on the water”?

Certainly some of those boats that fell off the registration rolls have been sold to new owners who are putting them back into service. And new-boat sales were up about 10 percent last year — not strong enough yet to offset the net loss in registered boats, but the trend is positive.

There are other reasons that the rate of decline in registrations slowed, says Jack Ellis, managing director of Info-Link, the market research and analytics firm.

Those factors include changes in state registration rules and the trend by more states to register human-powered vessels, such as canoes and kayaks, Ellis points out. The decline in motorized vessels from 2011 to 2012, for instance, was still about 100,000 boats, which is less than 1 percent, he says.

“Still encouraging,” he notes, “considering we only added about 200,000 boats to the fleet last year.”

States are making the case that because the growing human-powered fleet is taking more and more of their time and resources, they should be registered, which is a good discussion for another day.

All that notwithstanding, the figures for 2012 indicate that the rush of boaters heading for the pastures has slowed and that new-boat sales are starting to offset the expected retirement of the oldest, most tired boats in the fleet — trends we hope will continue.

“The decline in boat registrations is good news/bad news,” says NMMA president Thom Dammrich. “Good news that it is better than last year, but bad news that it is still falling.

But this is just a matter of new-boat sales don’t yet equal the normal number of old-boat retirements from the fleet each year. We need to see more new-boat sales to stem the registration declines.”

Helping stem the tide — and certainly worthy of note — is the lapsed boat registration initiative developed and executed by the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation.

This registration marketing program is patterned after the RBFF’s successful effort to bring lapsed anglers who haven’t renewed their fishing licenses back into the fold. Anglers who haven’t renewed are encouraged to sign up through direct-marketing efforts, including a four-color postcard. The angler program has contributed to the sale of 1.35 million fishing licenses since its launch in 2008, according to the organization. In 2012, the outreach resulted in more than 242,000 licenses sold and about $4.98 million in gross revenue.

After a successful pilot program in Oregon, RBFF rolled out the boat registration program last year, sending direct-mail pieces to about 450,000 boaters in 15 states whose registration had expired, RBFF president Frank Peterson told me on Tuesday.

That outreach resulted in more than 32,000 registration renewals (about an 8 percent response rate) and about $1.1 million for those states. This year, the March/April mailing went out to boaters in four more states.

“We’re only hamstrung by a state’s inability to share information with us,” Peterson said. “The states are happy with it. We feel real comfortable we’re on to something here.”

Peterson would be very happy to eventually reach maybe 1 million lapsed boaters in 40 states, which if the current response rates hold up could pull in 80,000 new renewals a year.

“I think people are feeling a little better,” Peterson said in response to the most recent Coast Guard figures. “Gas prices are coming down, but it doesn’t hurt to remind people of the fun they’re had on their boats.”

Lastly, any talk about the large number of boats that have fallen off the registration rolls and seemingly disappeared invariably leaves people scratching their heads. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked, ‘What happens to boats when they die?’ ” Ellis says.

Click here for videos that show the inglorious end that sometimes befalls what were once someone’s pride and joy.

Between breaks in the meeting, I spoke with leadership council secretary Thom Dammrich and chairman Matt Gruhn, along with Grow Boating chairman Joe Lewis, to get a snapshot of growth in the here and now.

Although sales at his Mount Dora Boating Center dealership slowed in March, Lewis said business was up nicely for the first quarter and that February was the strongest “in 10 years, at least.”

Interestingly, the growth his central Florida dealership experienced bucked some industry product trends. “It was all fiberglass recreational sterndrives,” said Lewis, a co-chairman of the leadership council’s marketing committee. “I can’t give away a pontoon boat.”

If things break right, Lewis said growth in new-boat sales industry-wide could hit 10 percent again this year. “The only wild card is the weather,” he said, echoing a sentiment I heard from a number of people. “People’s attitudes are a lot better.”

On a day in which the Dow Jones industrial average set a new record, closing above 15,000 for the first time, there were plenty of nods given to the impact of the bull market and the related wealth effect on boat sales.

“They see the stock market gains, and it leads to a sense of security. When it’s up, people feel good, even though,” he noted, expressing the caution of one who hasn’t forgotten the market trough that occurred in March 2009, “it’s the most unstable thing in the world.”

NMMA president Thom Dammrich reiterated the outlook that the strong start the industry had this year was tempered in March and April by the late spring across much of the country.

He, too, believes new-boat sales could finish up somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, although he cautioned that he was starting to hear “rumbles” of a possible economic slowdown in the second half of the year. That certainly would make it more difficult to reach the upper end of the current industry growth estimates.

Dammrich listed the improvements in housing and the surging stock market among the factors driving boat and equipment sales. “Housing is a huge one,” he said. “Housing prices are up, and inventories are down. Foreclosures are down. Housing will lift the entire economy.” Growth in the automobile and RV industries, he noted, is also a positive indicator for recreational boating.

I asked Dammrich whether the biggest hurdles the industry is facing are short-term and cyclical or long-term and structural.

“I don’t think our biggest challenges are cyclical,” he said. “Our biggest challenges are diversity and youth” — in other words, the impact of tectonic demographic shifts on the industry and the ensuing aging of our core market, which in one way or another is the focus of the leadership council and the Growth Summit initiatives.

MRAA president Matt Gruhn said lousy weather has hurt spring sales across the Midwest and elsewhere. There is still ice on some of the lakes in Minnesota, he said. The ice-out on Lake Minnetonka last year, he said, was the third-earliest on record. This year, he noted, it is the latest ever.

“This is a setback, especially when you look at things year over year,” Gruhn said. “There’s been such an extreme in weather between the two years. We’ve got some ground to make up.”

He remains cautiously optimistic that 2013 will be a good year. “There are a lot of positives,” he said. “Let’s get rid of this weather, and let’s hope the economy holds.”

In addition to innovations in science and technology, higher fuel prices and what was termed “modest” tax incentives also have helped spur the exploration of these difficult areas, according to the paper.

The story got me thinking: We aren’t hard-core geologists scouring old seismic surveys for clues to new deposits, but we are hardened small-business operators, builders and designers, survivors of the biggest temblor we are likely to see in our lives.

But are we digging deep enough in our own businesses? Have we sufficiently hardened our drill bits to bore through the bedrock of old thinking and discover the opportunities that lie beneath remote waters? Ours is a wonderful industry, one that blends dusty (but practical) seafaring ways with astonishing new advances in propulsion, electronics, materials and other areas.

Success today requires having a few toes in both camps, but there is little question that technology and her digital handmaidens are outpacing the old ways with each toss of the lead line. Our world is being transformed, and it’s important to ferret out inertia, or even lethargy masquerading as tradition.

One of my favorite headlines of late chastened readers: “Don’t Be the Office Tech Dinosaur.”

“For many people in the back half of their careers, the meaning is becoming all too clear: To keep from drifting, or being nudged into an early retirement, it’s time to add more high-tech arrows to their professional quiver — to refresh their skills with, say, some social-media or mobile-app expertise.” (Wall Street Journal, April 17).

You get the picture. I circulated that one to the troops and it prompted a good re-examination of our digital skills and strategies.

Here’s one more story that I thought might be suggestive of the times we live in, although I take exception to its premise and conclusions. The story ran in a department in the New York Times in early April titled: “You’re the Boss: The Art of Running a Small Business,” written by Cliff Oxford, founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. The headline: “Why I Like to Hire Great Recession Graduates.”

“Pampered. Pragmatic. Persnickety. These are not the employee attributes that build fast-growth companies, but all three describe a group of employees that fast-growth entrepreneurs must confront when hiring. Since the Great Recession of 2008, my advice to entrepreneurs is to run, baby, run when it comes to hiring this group.

“Oh by the way, I’m not talking about Gen X or Gen Y employees; I am talking about their parents — at least some of them.”

Ouch. (Click here for the entire story.)

Bold, ingenious entrepreneurs and risk-takers are unlocking vast reserves of oil and gas locked in shale rock through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling; new natural gas reserves are being rediscovered under the North Sea, and a longtime and respected investing “visionary” has identified the next big emerging market — the United States.

These companies aren’t run by kids who have been “hardened” for this still-difficult economy, as Mr. Oxford suggests, by staying home, going to local colleges and waiting tables. Sacrifice by staying local? Hardened by waiting tables? I was raking gravel after work a couple of days ago and had to explain to my perfectly normal 13-year-old son what the word “soft” meant as he attempted to drop his rake before the job was done and return to his computer.

Pushing around a load of stone does wonders at working the “pampered” out of young people.

Too old to change? Please. Consider the following.

I spoke with my brother, Peter the Boatman, last night, who told me a good friend of his was looking to buy yet one more boat, a Hunt with jet drives.

Nothing unusual about that other than the fact that this gentleman is 83 and has owned more than a dozen boats, from a 17-foot Mako to a Rybovich.

He’s not ready to swallow the anchor and he’s not, my brother assured me, “a tech dinosaur.” He still goes into the office regularly, sits on a number of boards and has forgotten more about boats than most of us will know.

Sure, new-boat sales numbers for the last couple of months could be better, but it’s still too early to be calling it a “spring swoon,” especially given the lousy weather across large sections of the country.

“I think that’s quite a bit of it,” says Ryan Kloppe, the national marine sales manager for Statistical Surveys. “March was 80 degrees last year. We got off to a quick summer and it stayed warm all year. I think you’ll see an uptick” once things warm up.

Still, the numbers bear watching. Sales of 11-to 40-foot outboard fiberglass boats were essentially flat in March, compared with the same month last year, and sales of aluminum pontoon boats rose a scant 1.3 percent. Those two segments were strong growth engines last year.

“What drives the pontoon market?” Kloppe asked rhetorically. “The Midwest — and we’re having snow today. People aren’t in the boating mood yet. Weather is a factor. It has to be.”

The early numbers reflect 27 states, or about 63 percent of the U.S. boat market. “It will be interesting when the first-quarter numbers come out in June,” says Kloppe, at which time the reports will reflect sales numbers from 48 states (Maine and Hawaii report annually).

Kloppe is not in the prediction business, but what he’s hearing from the folks he talks to suggest that new-boat sales will finish the year up somewhere between 4 and 8 percent. New-boat sales last year rose 9.6 percent.

Might this be the year we dodge the macro headlines? The Wall Street Journal on Monday trumpeted: “Economic Woes Abroad Bode Ill for the U.S.”

The analysis by Sudeep Reddy begins thusly: “Troubles overseas are threatening the U.S. recovery for the fourth year in a row. … The renewed fears of a global slowdown come after months of hope that a stronger recovery was finally taking shape.”

Bloomberg.com reported several days ago, “Like a horror movie with multiple sequels, The Economy: Spring Swoon IV probably won’t be as surprising or as scary as its predecessors.”

What’s different this time, the Bloomberg.com writers ask? For starters, the slowdown has been expected. Click here for the full report.

Bloomberg opines: “The deceleration is coming in response to an identifiable cause — the biggest federal budget tightening in more than 60 years  — rather than inchoate fears about a breakup among countries that use the euro, a Treasury-debt default or a hard landing for China’s economy. And the U.S. looks better prepared to withstand it, thanks in part to a rebounding housing market.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc., is quoted as saying the impact on the economy from tax increases and spending cuts will amount to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product this year, according to the Bloomberg piece. That’s the most since 1950, when military outlays were reduced after World War II, Zandi told reporters.

That estimate, the Bloomberg report continues, includes the effect of $85 billion in automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, which began March 1 and, according to some reports, will reduce GDP this year by 0.6 percentage point.

Zandi sees growth easing to an annual pace of 1.5 percent in the second quarter from 3.4 percent in the first before picking up to 3 percent in the final three months of 2013, according to Bloomberg.

“It felt scarier a year ago, two years ago,” Zandi told Bloomberg.com. “The threats we were facing felt more existential and were impossible to handicap,” a reference to the Greek financial woes and fears of a U.S. debt default.

So that’s the big picture. Shifting back to the world of boats, attendance at the recent Suncoast Boat Show in Sarasota, Fla., was up a healthy 17 percent and dealers and builders were upbeat, according to Trade Only executive editor Chris Landry, who attended the show. “The mood was good,” says Landry who talked to a number of exhibitors.

I’ve heard much the same sentiment in the Northeast.

“Our business has been through the roof,” says Jon Lyons, 31, sales manager for Ocean House Marina in Charlestown, R.I., a dealer for Regulator, Scout, Yamaha, Godfrey Pontoon Boats, Maritime and other brands. “Regulator sales have been very, very solid. Used boats have been unbelievable. We can’t keep anything in stock.”

This past week, Ocean House Marina celebrated 30 years in business with the opening of a new service facility. Not surprisingly, service was a godsend for the family business during the Great Recession.

“That took us through the recession,” says Lyons, whose father, Rob, started the business. “People who relied on boat sales alone were way off. Some are no longer in business. For 30 years, we’ve worked very hard to build up our service business.”

The hard work paid off. Last year was the best the business has had since it opened three decades ago.

Spring has been late in the Northeast, too, but Lyons says lousy weather mostly limits walk-ins and impulse buyers, who usually return later in the year if they’re serious about buying.

Eastern and Seaway Boats also has seen no signs of a dip. “It’s been steady since the first of the year,” says Bruce Perkins, director of sales and marketing for the Milton, N.H., builder, which produces Down East boats from 18 to 35 feet. “I’ve got a lot of boats to build.”

Perkins says he has about 40 boats in the pipeline, some of which have yet to be started. “No slowing down that we’ve seen yet,” he told me.

What’s driving sales?

“We fit the niche,” Perkins says. “The boats are classic-looking. They’ve got good value. They’re fuel-efficient. And we’re still seeing a lot of people downsizing.”

Eastern Boats is continuing to expand. The builder recently acquired several models from Rosborough Boats, of Nova Scotia, which now will be marketed as Rosborough Boats USA.

Pent-up demand is also a factor, according to the boatbuilder. “I think people got fed up with waiting,” Perkins says. “They’re going to enjoy their lives. Our target audience — 50 to 70 years old — has the money. None of these [boats] are being financed.”

But Perkins also hasn’t forgotten the hard times. “We’re very fortunate,” he says. “We knock on wood every time we remember the last three or four years, when you’d do anything to sell a boat.”

Nope. It was a pontoon boat, and on board was a grand dame with the sort of bearing you’d expect to find at this show getting a walkthrough along this flat-decked, outboard-powered fun boat. Palm Beach, pontoon boats and a silver-haired matron? The times, they are a changin’.

Aluminum pontoon and fishing boats have been among the hottest new-boat segments since 2009 and the depths of the Great Recession. Aluminum pontoons were up 20.4 percent in 2012 from the previous year, which amounts to about 34,000 units. Aluminum fishing boats were up 9.3 percent in 2012 on more than 37,000 units. And although most categories were lagging last year’s new-boat sales numbers, pontoons were up 6.8 percent for the first two months of this year from the same period in 2012.

Trade Only associate editor Reagan Haynes looks at the many factors behind the surge in pontoons in the May issue of Soundings Trade Only. Why has a category once deemed to be the stodgy choice of oldsters become, well, sort of hip? Not only do they represent good value, but this new generation of amped-up, vamped-up pontoons also shouts “FUN” in capital letters.

We’d all do well to pay attention to a boat that does such an honest job of delivering on the promise of happy days on the water. The winning formula: affordability, versatility, a ton of space, efficiency, simplicity and lots of laughter. Pontoons do a great job of combining utility and good times for those boating on lakes and inshore waters.

Aesthetics? Don’t be a snob. And don’t let old thinking keep you from missing the boat. The customer is usually right. Are there features or “triggers” or simply a better understanding of today’s buyer that pontoon builders have hit upon that can be worked into other boats? Absolutely.

One last data point.

At the Providence Boat Show in January, I spoke with Dick Cromwell, who was part of an industry roundtable on the “next generation of boaters.” The president of the Freedom Boat Club of Rhode Island spoke of the success he had adding a pontoon boat to his fiberglass fleet.

I called him yesterday to continue our conversation. Cromwell told me that the first rental boats of the season went into the salt water a couple of days ago. “And believe it or not, one of the first boats that went out was the pontoon boat,” he said. “I was scratching my head.” Spring has been slow to come to the Northeast — the water is still cold, and the day was cool.

He was a little surprised by the early birds but not so much that the pontoon boat left the dock. “People love them,” said Cromwell, who rents boats at three locations in Rhode Island. “They’re like a floating living room. And they’re hotter than firecrackers.”

Cromwell has been trying to buy a second one to add to his 22-boat rental fleet, but he hasn’t been able to find a used one of sufficient quality. “I’m going to have to break down and buy a new one,” he says.

The Harris FloteBote Saltwater 24 has a third pontoon running down the centerline that Cromwell says is necessary when the wind pipes up on Narragansett Bay. “It’s almost like a trimaran hull,” he said. “It adds buoyancy in a heavier chop. I was a skeptic originally, but this thing rides just as well as some of the center consoles. They’re good. And the members love them.”

Cromwell has also seen the shift in attitude.

“People used to stick their nose up and say, ‘I don’t want to be seen on a pontoon boat,’ ” he said.

That’s changing, too, even in the briny.

On that point, Soundings magazine is celebrating its 50th birthday this month. And Trade Only will turn 35 next year. Veteran graybeard staffers like me sometimes wonder where the time has gone until we find ourselves hoisting a grandchild on our knee or reminiscing about the days when newsrooms were filled with cigarette smoke, the clickety-clack of typewriter keys and the din of reporters working the phones. It is a much quieter but no less busy environment today.

It is impossible to discuss either Soundings or Trade Only without a nod to the late founding publisher John P. “Jack” Turner, a smart, colorful curmudgeon of the sort who helped build the industry in those early go-go years, when wood was bowing to fiberglass and pleasure boating was on a steep ascent.

“There was a gold rush mentality. People were jumping into boats, builders were selling, and everyone was optimistic,” Turner wrote on the occasion of our 40th anniversary as he reflected on the glory days of the New York Boat Show and early in-water shows in Newport, R.I., and Annapolis, Md. “Publishers and manufacturers threw endless parties where the food was lavish and the booze gushed.”

Turner continued, describing a time when the grass, at least in hindsight, was a bit greener: “Going to a boat show was fun. Being an exhibitor was fun. Life was fun. The boating industry was a community of people who were in a business that got them out in boats, under boats and on the water, and that mattered far more than money.”

To be fair, Turner was the first to admit that what developed from the first “primitive” issue of Soundings that he and two colleagues cranked out in 1963 could not be replicated today — or even a decade ago. “I can say without a doubt that we wouldn’t even try,” Turner wrote 10 years ago.

But timing accounts for plenty in this world. What these men may have lacked in publishing acumen, even in the early 1960s, they more than made up for by catching and riding the huge wave of expansion that took place when fiberglass boatbuilding took hold and leisure time and discretionary income increased for the burgeoning middle class.

Notably, the publication that Turner bootstrapped into existence was not the typical boating magazine of the day. “From the outset it had been my goal to produce a real newspaper, one that treated boating and the marine world as news, rather than the glossy feature material from which the national magazines were constructed,” the former newspaperman once confided. “In those days, and for many years later, we viewed ourselves as wildcatters — the Flying Tigers of marine publishing — and we behaved that way.”

The same held true in spades for Trade Only.

Working with Jack Turner and his talented but somewhat motley crew was an education in publishing and in life, more an adventure than a job, especially in those early years. Turner was literally larger than life. The former Marine was a large, towering man with enormous hands and a big head and gaze that could lock on to you like a spotlight sweeping a prison yard.

He had a cutting wit, and woe to the pretentious blowhard who crossed too close to his bows, for he might use him as a whetstone, depending on his mood or the extent to which the interloper chose to bloviate.

A Renaissance man, Jack was an ever-changing piece of work: complicated, creative and restless as a line squall. At various times he was a fiction writer, gourmet cook, boatbuilder, sailor, woodworker, gardener, artist and more. And he created what may well have been the industry’s first Internet service — an electronic version of the Soundings brokerage section at a time when the Internet, in the words of one who was there, was still “geek land.”

“He was waiting for the technology to catch up with the elegance of the idea.” That’s how one industry watcher described it to me on his passing in 2005. “He was way out ahead … and he loved obscuring, behind his casual sloppiness, just how extraordinarily intelligent he was.”

When a magazine was completed and ready for shipping to the printer, Turner would raise a conch shell to his lips and trumpet an otherworldly call, summoning all hands into the galley or the old open paste-up area for a late afternoon thirst-slackening session of grog.

It’s easy to miss the old days, but we had our share of heavy weather, too — a near bankruptcy, layoffs, a libel suit or two, efforts to organize a union and other bumps along the bottom. The Great Recession was a long stretch of unsettled weather.

Today, both Soundings and Trade Only are healthy and growing under the ownership of Active Interest Media.

I miss Jack, even though we didn’t always see eye to eye. We continue to follow the path he set for fair, accurate and objective reporting on our sport and industry.

Turner started Trade Only as a supplement in Soundings in January 1978, and it went out to the hundreds of marine dealers who sold the magazine.

“Initially, I edited Trade Only,” Turner wrote in a look-back 25 years ago. “It was my brainchild, and nobody on the editorial staff wanted to go near it. A trade publication? B-O-R-I-N-G.”

“Trade only took off like a small rocket. Suddenly it was a newspaper. People were reading it and talking about it. There was no question but what we had filled a gap. I was having a great time writing and editing. The staff was even warming up to it.”

“Then, under the guise of ‘efficiency and organization,’ the editorial department took it away from me.”

Damn editors.

First the words. Imitating a saying of the old Harkers Island, N.C., watermen, Harker said in his best island accent:

“The wind blew sooo hard and the tide was sooo high that the sharks were eating the collards out of the garden.”

The North Carolina born and raised delivery captain comes from six generations of sailors and is as comfortable at the helm of a 70-foot ketch as he is on a trawler, motoryacht or sportfisherman.

Harker is one of those capable, unpretentious and entertaining boat guys who make our industry a little brighter place to work. More fun. Makes me glad I’m knocking around boats rather than working on someone’s taxes or teaching ninth-grade English, not to disparage accountants or teachers. (Marilyn DeMartini, who does public relations work in our industry, introduced Harker and me. She sent me some of Harker’s written musings on the correct assumption that I would enjoy them.)

“Been boating all your life?” I asked Harker.

“I was in mother’s womb when they used to go shrimping on the Neuse River in New Bern,” said Harker, who is 57 and makes his way up and down the Eastern Seaboard about a dozen times a year. “I’m constantly on boats. Pushing them around. Traveling. I never drove a submarine, but I feel I could if I was given a chance.”

His early start on the amniotic currents of the Neuse explains the boat part.

Harker’s descriptive use of language can probably be attributed to his mother, who at 85 still teaches a class in creative writing at Craven Community College in New Bern. That and the fact that the former combat engineer with the 82nd Airborne Division and his forebears have at various times lived colorful lives. His great-grandfather sailed with Commodore Dewey in the Philippines. And his grandfather was a “notorious” bootlegger in North Carolina during Prohibition.

Successful? “I think he drank up most of his profits,” Harker said with a laugh.

When we have more time, Harker promised, he’ll tell me a story about the time he had to put into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during a delivery to make emergency repairs. Didn’t hurt that he was an 82nd Airborne vet.

He also spent a year in Afghanistan in 2011 as a private contractor helping supply forward U.S. military bases along the Pakistan-Afghan border via old Mi-8 Russian-made helicopters.

You get the picture. There is no shortage of stories, and Harker tells each of them well.

In his late 20s, Harker worked the boatbuilding yards in eastern North Carolina and also built himself a Bruce Roberts-designed Adventurer 25, appropriately named Grayarea. Most of the old gaffers who taught him how to build and repair boats are gone, said Harker, who holds a 100-ton license.

He moved to Fort Lauderdale in the mid-1990s — “if you’re going to be in the boat business, it’s the place to be,” he said — but still has a house near Oriental, N.C. Harker recently finished restoring a late-1950s 13-1/2 foot runabout with tail fins and a Corvette-style dash.

In the way of the boat world, he traded a derelict sitting in his yard in Oriental for an equally rough tail fin number wasting away in the yard of another good ol’ boy. “It had three big bullfrogs living in it,” Harker said. “It was in pretty rough shape. My wife said, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’ ”

A couple of weeks ago, Harker, his wife “Mo” and her cousin from Argentina spent several hours cruising the canals of Broward Country in the refurbished but yet unnamed little boat. A bit of background. “My wife is a real girly girl,” Harker said. “Everything I love she could care less about. Fast cars, motorcycles, guns, sailboats.”

Here is the account of the voyage in Harker’s written words:

“My new boat is only 13.5 ft. It may have been substantial in 1959 but nowadays it’s a bath toy. It has been blowing the lard out of the biscuit for the last few days so our plan was to meander around the 100 miles of canals in Broward County. We went through downtown [Fort Lauderdale] then went a ways up the Middle River. Then we turned back south past Bahia Mar and Lake Silvia. It’s small enough to duck under one of the fixed bridges off Silvia and come out by Pier 66.

“All of the cruise ships were in so I asked her cousin if he’d like to see the port. As we approached the 17th St bridge I could see Port Everglades was going to be rough but I ignored the little angel tapping my ear saying don’t do this to her. We were the smallest vessel in the harbor and it was blowing the dog off the chain out of the west when we cleared the first ship.

“The pilot boats were standing by with the tugs and the ship was using its thrusters to hold itself to the dock while they shook off their lines. Between the wind and the giant whirlpools our little boat swung about madly. There’s no windshield yet so spray soaked us quickly. Mo began to squeal and pulled her hat down over her face. She had a Brazilian wrap over her shoulders with water flapping from the fringe.

“We were well out in the harbor by now and there wasn’t anything in the cockpit that wasn’t wringing wet. Every time spray broke over the bow Mo would squeal a little louder. Finally she said, ‘We have to go back!’ I said, ‘We’re already halfway now. It’s further back than it is to go on.’ I was grinning so hard occasionally I had to spit out the salt water coming through my teeth.

“I was well inside the security zone around the cruise ships. The U.S. Coast Guard, Broward Sheriff’s department and Homeland Security vessels all watched as I motored a few boat lengths away past them. In most situations they would have come right over and shook their finger at me. But I think they all realized I was no threat to anyone beside myself.

“We finally crossed the port and got inside of Dania Cutoff. I took a break in the mangroves to relieve myself and Mo wrung out her wrap. They were both grinning like a mule eating briars and agreed that THAT was exciting. As you go up the canal you see less houses and more mangroves. By the time we were halfway around the backside, Mo said, ‘There’s nothing here. It’s boring.’ I asked if she wanted to go back through the port, which she quickly declined. We made it back into the New River and headed to the landing.

“As we approached the landing I realized what I thought was Sea Tow pulling someone in was actually Florida Marine patrol. I had made sure I had everything in order for just such a situation. He eased up alongside of me and said, ‘What year is that thing?’ Then he waved and drove on off. I half expected Mo to be traumatized and never want to go back out on it. But all she could talk about was how much fun she had had. I don’t know if I could be happier. The boat made it back to the landing, my wife is happy with the boat. What more could you ask for?”

As you’d expect, the big established builders and brokers were there in force, but so were some newcomers and at least one Italian builder that made its Palm Beach debut with a couple of small boats on the hard — the Eolo brand from Nadirmarine. You’ve got to start somewhere.

It bodes well to see new people excited about their creations and about our industry. New blood is a good thing. Small start-ups that challenge the status quo keep all of us on our toes. And there’s always room for smart, nimble companies that know their customers well, especially now that the tide is starting to rise.

I’ll give you an example.

I was talking with Mitch Sorbera of Retro Marine about a new 25-foot pocket trawler he is coming out with next year — more on that in a moment — and he said to make sure I walk a bit farther toward the south entrance and check out a new boat he thought was really nice-looking.

The boat was a 23-foot navy blue center console with big bow flare, a sweet tumblehome transom and powered by a single 250-hp Yamaha on a custom bracket. I met the co-owner, a 26-year-old avid tournament fisherman and boatbuilder named Josh Stoner Miller.

He and his uncle, Marc Stoner, run Stoner Boatworks of South Miami, which also builds the Stoner 26.

Palm Beach was the debut of the Stoner 23, and the young man was optimistic and understandably proud of the handsome center console, which he described as a melding of Palm Beach and Carolina styling.

Downturn? What downturn?

“Come back to Florida and we’ll take the boat fishing,” he said with the youthful excitement of someone with nothing but tomorrows ahead.

Another example. Industry veteran Scott Shane was handling the Florida debut of another nice little custom center console, the OBX 21, which is built by Verns Boatworks of North Carolina, which produces custom open boats from 19 to 30 feet.

“We’re trying to make it like a small Buddy Davis,” said Shane, of Montauk Yacht Sales in Freeport, N.Y., the exclusive dealer for the builder. “We’re going to build one at a time. We’re not going to rush it. It’s for the discriminating guy.”

Shane has experience selling boats, testing boats and writing about boats. But like so many of us, he still has his ear to the ground, trying to discern where the consumer and the market are headed. “We’re listening to what everybody says,” he remarked. “I think we’ll see a shift in the market. I think the hot market for the next five or six years will be boats between 19 and 30 feet.”

Retro Marine’s Sorbera had his 21-foot Cape Island outboard pocket cruiser next to Shane’s new center console. Sorbera, who rode out the recession like most of us — holding his breath and tightening his belt — said he’s finally seen a shift.

“I think I’ll end up selling two or three boats from this show, which is unbelievable for us,” said Sorbera, who is based in Salem, Mass. “Something is underfoot here. I feel a change in the market.”

He gave me an example of shift. He had a customer for one of his 21-footers early in the fall of 2008, who backed out once the market tanked. The same man came back and bought one of Retro Marine’s Nova Scotia-built boats a few months ago, which now lives happily in a slip in Punta Gorda, Fla.

“Four and half years later, we sold him a boat,” says Sorbera.

Sorbera is confident enough now to put the money into the tooling for a new 25-foot Nova Scotia-built trawler, which will debut next year. “The hull is beautiful,” he said. “We’re anteing up to the table. God is saying, either get them out of purgatory or kill them.”

Although he retains the wariness of a survivor of the Great Recession, Sorbera feels good coming out of Palm Beach and other winter shows.

“I’m absolutely walking on air,” he said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but something is happening. People are saying, ‘I’m going to enjoy myself. Life is too short. Let me enjoy life a little bit.’ ”

Amen to that.

I enjoy this show, and I always enjoy talking with the Harvard-educated circumnavigator on a variety of topics, from seamanship to teaching kids to become marine techs to the foibles of relying too heavily on technology at sea.

He’s smart and independent and likes folks who set their own course and aren’t easily swayed from it. In the course of our conversation yesterday about how the show did this year, he informed me, “I’m going to start the Unreasonable Persons Club.”

Most of his exhibitors are charter members. “These guys all have a vision,” said Sprague, who is 63. “And they’re trying to get the world to conform to their vision. They’re all members of the Unreasonable Persons Club. They won’t conform to what other people think is possible.”

They have what you or I might call “stick-to-itiveness.” Others might say stubbornness, but Sprague says the doubters just don’t understand them.

“They have this vision and dream,” Sprague continued. “And people come to them and say, ‘It’s not possible.’ They’re the reasonable people. Ignore the naysayers,” Sprague advised. “If you listened to the naysayers, you’d never do anything, and they’d be happy because you’d be just like them.”

Sprague said it’s OK to fail. “It’s just not OK not to try.”

The exhibitors are his friends, and he admires their skill, tenacity and resourcefulness. Business is improving, Sprague agreed, but business is still tough. “But we’re all looking at each other and saying we made it,” he said. “It’s learning how to do it with less. Learning how to do it more efficiently. Learning how to use our time more effectively. And you don’t take the customer for granted at all.”

From my conversations with exhibitors, I would say the mood at this year’s show was more upbeat than last year. Sprague agreed. “We were up in exhibitors and people who came to the show,” he said. “Not a lot, but up.”

He says he had an epiphany talking with a first-time exhibitor from Sea Hawk Paints, who compared the boating know-how of the people at the show to the baseball knowledge of those attending a Red Sox game in Boston. “He said this is like going to Fenway Park,” Sprague said. “Everybody in the audience knew boats.”

This year he took representatives from an Icelandic shipping company that recently began working out of Portland through the show to meet boatbuilders who might benefit from having a more direct means of shipping boats overseas. “Pretty cool,” he said. “Pretty cool.”

Sprague doesn’t want to let the show drift too far from its workboat roots. “I want more lobster boats,” Sprague told me. “A lobster boat that is a real lobster boat. The heritage of what Maine is, is a working boat. I’d like to see more of them here to remind us of where we came from.”

I suspect you’ll see a working lobster boat at the show next year.

“I’m unreasonable, like we all are,” Sprague said. “There’s a difference between being unreasonable and being a curmudgeon. I’m unreasonable because I’m trying to accomplish something.”

He had plenty of skeptics when he held the first boatbuilders show 26 years ago with a scant dozen exhibitors, but he didn’t let that deter him. This year the show attracted 202 independent small-business folks.

“They’re bucking the tide and being thoroughly unreasonable, and we love them to death,” Sprague said. “They struggle hard to make their vision reality.”

Sprague attributes his unreasonableness — having a vision and dreams, you might say — to the experience of being a skipper, for being responsible for the safety of a boat and crew and getting her from one place to another in some far-flung places of the world.

“I think the experience of being on the water and having discrete goals works that into you,” he said. Some get it through other means, but, he noted, “That’s where I got it. The water taught me to be unreasonable.”

Back to the show. Sprague said there was a suggestion after last year’s show to move regular exhibitors into new spots to mix things up a bit. He didn’t care much for the idea. In one of his newsletters, he wrote that a number of exhibitors are comfortable in their own spaces.

“[They] know exactly how long the extension cord has to be and are intimate with the holes in the floor and the nail for their banners. They like their neighbors and watched their kids grow up and really don’t need or want the excitement or stress of a fabricated adventure.”

He told me that when he walks the old railroad foundry and looks at some of the new exhibits, he still sees old friends who have died, standing where they did for so many years. Sprague recited their names: Tom Morris, Bill Sweetman, David Stainton, Bill Harding, Ralph Stevens, David Corcoran.

“All these men are standing there,” he said, “still in their places.”