Here are some vendors you should not overlook during your visit to the Seattle Boat Show, which runs through Sunday this year.

 
Our old friends from GetStorganized are present (East 1429), and they’ve got some new items to show.

 
Our new friends from SeaSucker are in East 1329, with a line of high-quality suction-mounted products familiar to east-coast boaters, but virtually unheard of on the west coast. This is their first boat show in our region.

Our friends at BoatLeather are present (East 1332) with leather wheel covers, chafing gear, and other functional and beautiful fixture coverings. They’ve also got these clever utility clips that slip over typical cylindrical rails.

The BottomSiders folks have a display (East 513) that shows how their custom-fabricated cockpit cushions are constructed. These are especially popular in sailboat cockpits, but more and more power boaters are finding applications for them as well.

And even if you didn’t bring any children along, head down to the Center For Wooden Boats pond (West 11, under the stairs at the south end of the hall), have a seat, and watch the action for a few minutes.

Don’t forget to stop by East 714 at the Seattle Boat Show to pick up an updated copy of the indispensable Waggoner Cruising Guide. Bob and Marilynn Hale are there to sign your copy, or just to chat.

As I’ve written before, this is the one “must-have” cruising guide for Puget Sound, the San Juans, the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and the Inside Passage north to Prince Rupert.

Here are links to my earlier round-up of San Juan Island cruising guides:

San Juan Islands: Cruising Guide Roundup

San Juan Islands: Cruising Guides Redux

I’ll be back at the Seattle Boat Show today, and I’ve got to poke around and see if I can find one of these. Content below provided by the manufacturer.

Engine, wind or other noise can prevent boaters from hearing a cell phone conversation when on the water.  Featuring exclusive, patent-pending MicroBlue™ technology, Cobra Marine’s MR F300 BT waterproof handset with Bluetooth® wireless technology transmits phone calls loud and clear.  Cobra’s innovative product recently won a DAME Category Winner award at the 2008 Marine Equipment Trade Show in the marine electronics category.

The first-of-its-kind, Cobra’s MR F300 BT creates an entirely new product category for marine electronics.  It easily helps boaters tackle communication challenges due to the noisy marine environment or other passengers’ conversations without interrupting the outdoor experience.  Users can communicate with other shore- or boat-based cell phone users while their phone is kept safe and dry.

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More folding crab traps! As always, Navagear strives to be your #1 source of information on folding crab traps.

Jolly Good Trap Company is based in British Columbia, and though I haven’t written about them before, they aren’t new kids on this particular block. They’ve been around for years. The only reason I neglected them is that I’d never seen one of their traps in person, and the website looks like it might be a little bit out of date.

But the Jolly Good crab and prawn traps can be seen at the Seattle Boat Show, at the Popeye’s Marine display (Concourse 2101, upstairs). Jolly good offers a variety of sizes for both crab and shrimp, including very small traps for kayakers.

If you look at the crab traps in person, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the unconventional entry gate. In fact, there’s no gate at all. The crabs climb up onto the top of the trap, and then fall down through the red ring, and they can’t get out.

I know a lot of you curmudgeons out there are skeptical, but Ray Surette, owner of Jolly Good, assures me that it works, and that it may even be more reliable than the conventional swing-up gate, since there are no moving parts to get jammed in the “open” position. If you prefer, they also sell traps with a more familiar swinging gate.

This trap is by far the easiest to fold and unfold of any I’ve tried. It folds into a flat rectangle, and stays closed with a little clip, To deploy it, unclip the retainer and the bungee cord pulls it open and holds it there. It’s also the least expensive of the folding traps we’ve covered.

But how does it catch crabs? I don’t know, and as usual, I’m eager to hear anecdotes and fish stories from owners. Tell us your experiences with the Jolly Good traps!

In case you want to catch up, here are some earlier folding crab traps we’ve written about:

• Coil-Away Flexible Crab Ring Trap
• Flex Fold Crab Trap Stowage
• Folding Crab Trap Great for Small Boats
• Another Clever Folding Crab Trap
• Building a Better Crab Trap

What if there were a heavy-duty, three-person rowing inflatable that weighed less than 15 pounds? That packed into a stuff-sack 25.5″ × 10″ × 12″? That was made in Canada, not overseas, by a company with over 30 years of experience making small, portable boats? That was price-competitive with heavier inflatables of comparable quality?

I don’t know about you, but if I ever ran across such an item, I’d want to learn more! Which is why the highlight of my visit to the Seattle Boat Show today was, without question, the Feathercraft BayLee. Wow!

[This is actually the lightweight two-person model, which weighs less than ten pounds.]

These aren’t “toy” boats. Feathercraft has been a leader in skin-on-frame collapsible expedition kayaks for a long time. This company enjoys a reputation for producing extremely high-quality products at its plant in Vancouver, BC.

This reputation is very important because once you see this boat, your first impression is likely to be “It’s gotta be a gimmick”. The BayLee boats are so lightweight, and consciously or not we often equate lightweight with cheap, poorly made, insubstantial, and inadequate. “A tender-quality craft in pool-toy weight?,” I seem to hear you saying. “Can’t be done.”

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The Seattle Times article “Struggling boat retailers hope event helps them stay afloat” by Blythe Lawrence just about sums it up. My initial assessment yesterday was confirmed in later conversations: There has been about a 20% decline in the number of vendors and boats compared to the 2008 show.

Even so, the show was very well attended. There were a LOT of people there, especially for a weekday. Not huge crowds, and no long lines that I saw. But a vibrant, upbeat feeling.

I got to catch up with old acquaintances, and I made a few new ones. I got to see some new products, including the Garmin GHP-10 autopilot I’m interested in for my boat. I climbed aboard a few new boats, and I got to examine the Junk Raft up close. By the way, that thing really is junk!

It was fun, and I’m not done by any means. Here are a few pictures I took, including a couple previews of items that will appear in future Navagear posts.

A lot of junk on the Junk Raft:

Another folding crab trap:

A cheesy gimmick, a “wheel of fortune” where you spin the entire boat:

A delightful way to take a break from the hucksters, courtesy of the Center For Wooden Boats:

Some new inflatable kayak products in Walker Bay’s Airis line:

Officially, the boat show doesn’t open for another half hour. But Navagear and Puget Sound Maritime are there! We do it all for you, our loyal readers.

I’ve got to say, things DO look different this year. There are far fewer huge boats. Some familiar vendors are not present this year. And while the show occupies both the Quest Field Events Center and South Lake Union, it does not extend onto Quest Field itself. My rough estimate, after spending about 30 minutes looking around, is that the vendor/boat presence is about 80-90% what it was last year.

Which is not to say “Don’t bother!” Even in my brief walk-through, it was obvious there were a lot of new boats, and a lot of new products. Also, there are a lot of established product lines that may deserve renewed attention in these tough economic times. Here are just a few examples.

Nordic Tugs has reintroduced their trailerable 26-footer. This was a great pocket cruiser, and I’m glad to see it’s back.

Gig Harbor Boat Works continues to produce wonderful modern interpretations of traditional small sailing and rowing boats.

And yeah, for those with lots of liquid capital, along with the rest of us looky-loos, there are still a lot of big boats. A garbage can has been provided for scale, I’m pretty certain.

Plus, from time to time amid the gloss and glitter of the new new NEW, you run across something that’s just charming. This is NOT a new production Ranger tug, but I wasn’t able to determine how old it is. Awww, it’s so cuuute!

I get a lot of press releases from marine equipment manufacturers, but all I seem to hear is Miami Miami Miami!

Ok, so the Miami International Boat Show is bigger, and that’s where a lot of manufacturers debut their new products, and frankly, the weather is probably a lot better there.

But what about us? The Seattle Boat Show is a big boat show. It’s a major event. And I don’t mean “a major event for a podunk little town like this.” It’s a huge show!

The fact is, a lot of the manufacturers will have their new products on display at Seattle, which wraps up February 1st; plenty of time to get show displays packed up, transported, and redeployed in Miami before that event opens on February 12th.

There’s another reason I’m keen to spend a lot of time at the boat show this year: I wonder what effect the sluggish economy will have? Will attendance fall off from previous years? Will there be a notable shift in the vendors and displays? Less emphasis on new boat sales and more emphasis on improvements to already-owned boats? Fewer megaboats and more medium-sized boats? Fewer boat loan vendors and more boat charter vendors?

I don’t know…I’m just wondering. Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know what I learn.

As I’ve indicated before, I’m extremely interested in the new GHP 10  autopilot from Garmin. I’m especially excited about the Shadow Drive user interface modality (sorry, I can’t think of a less geeky way to describe it). You can read my earlier post to learn why I’m genuinely “excited” about it; I really think this is the way an autopilot should work!

So far, though, I haven’t had a chance to see one in operation. I plan to remedy that situation shortly, but in the meantime…

Al Herum of Marine Electronics Reviews has published a hands-on review of the unit, including his do-it-yourself installation experience, setup and calibration, and sea trials. 

It sounds like my understanding of the Shadow Drive interface is accurate, and now I’m even more excited about seeing one in action.

[A new message from Michael Campbell of the Seattle Boat Show. Thanks to PugetSoundMaritime for the heads-up. —Tim]

Over the summer, I kept seeing stories in all the boating magazines about two guys who sailed a JUNKraft from Los Angeles to Hawaii, to draw attention to a major problem in our oceans – the accumulation of plastic trash in the seas.  This huge volume of plastic trash now drifting in the oceans interrupts the feeding of marine life and releases toxins into the water. They refer to their vessel as the JUNKraft because it is constructed out of nothing more than that – junk! The raft is made of 15,000 plastic bottles, derelict sailboat masts, fishing nets and more.

I was fascinated with their two-month journey and thought all of you would enjoy the opportunity to see the raft and learn more about their voyage.

Turns out, I was able to chase them down and convince them to bring the JUNKraft to Seattle. They are loading it up this week and will truck it to Seattle. Joel Paschal was one of the captains of the raft and he will be at show to answer your questions along with our friends at the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, whose mission is to protect and preserve Puget Sound by tracking down and stopping the discharge of toxic pollutants into its waters.

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