The local maritime industry is currently booming, but there is a history of its success that dates back much farther than any vessel on the sea today
Just as cars, trucks, RVs, and houses have been selling at unprecedented rates despite—or perhaps because of—the viral pandemic, so, too, there’s a boom in the maritime industry. And since our state capital, Annapolis, and in fact the State of Maryland have been inextricably intertwined with the water for centuries, the boom in boat sales is good news for everybody. But there are still challenges ahead if the boom is to continue booming.
A study compiled of data gathered in 2018, before the pandemic struck, determined that boating had a $3.5 billion economic impact in Maryland. Another study indicates that nearly a third of that productivity takes place in Anne Arundel County alone.
Last year, the Anne Arundel County Economic Development Corporation commissioned Sage Policy Group, Inc. to study the economic and fiscal benefits generated by the county’s maritime industry. The report noted that with more than 500 miles of coastline, 300 marinas, and 12,000 boat slips, Anne Arundel County provides better public access to the water than any other county in Central Maryland. That access supports industries ranging from building boats to providing marinas to house them.
“The industry’s ability to attract recreational boaters and their spending power to the county also supports jobs and economic activity,” the report stated. The presence of the Coast Guard station on Thomas Point and Naval Academy also add some panache.
Sage determined that Anne Arundel County’s maritime industry directly supports nearly 5,700 jobs and more than $274 million in annual employee compensation. When you figure out where those 5,700 employees spend their earnings, the report estimates that the county’s maritime industry supports 8,600 jobs, $416 million in annual employee compensation, and nearly $1.2 billion in annual economic activity.
To put things in perspective, the Sage report notes that while Anne Arundel County’s maritime industry’s $1.2 billion in annual economic activity is impressive, it’s only about 2.5 percent of the county’s annual gross county product as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Still, it’s about 43 times greater than the county’s agriculture industry.
The report concludes that recreational boaters in Anne Arundel County spent $96 million every year on their boats and boating-related activities.
And that was before the pandemic.
Since then, the National Marine Manufacturers Association has estimated that boat sales have increased perhaps as much as 12 percent all across America. In Maryland, there’s anecdotal evidence that the business is booming. One exhibitor at the spring boat show at the Bay Bridge Marina in April reported that “the show was fabulous. Over the four days it was open, we had almost 10,000 people there. Everybody said it was good to be out and all the brokers sold out their inventory at the show.”
Early in the epidemic, boat dealers expressed anxiety as the pandemic caused a shutdown in activity, then relief as it appeared that the public perceived boating as a safe pursuit, one that could be enjoyed by the family together, apart from the rest of the world. “They couldn’t take their family to Europe or Disneyland,” said one broker, “so they spent their money on boats.”
Dealers are also reporting that more people than ever before who are new to boating are buying into the lifestyle, purchasing new and used powerboats and sailboats, large and small.
So to gain some historical perspective on this phenomenon, let’s start with a boat ride in Annapolis Harbor.
Picturesque Scenes of a Booming Industry
Sitting on a small boat in the middle of the harbor, you can look northeast across the Severn River and see Greenbury Point on the far side, marked by the trio of red-and-white “Eiffel” towers, with a glimpse of the diplodocus-skeleton arch of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge beyond. Scanning to the right, you see the waterfront houses and condo buildings festooning Horn Point, the shoreline girded with marinas packed so tightly that an enterprising cat could traverse the full length of the Eastport waterfront by hopping from transom to transom without ever getting his feet wet.
Then you see the long, low expanse of the Spa Creek drawbridge, site of the Maritime Republic of Eastport’s annual .05K Bridge Run. The spindly spire of St. Mary’s Church pierces the sky above the off-white block of the Waterfront Hotel that marks the entrance to the Market Slip, better known as “Ego Alley.” The tall wedding-cake tiers of the State House dome rise up above the clamor of City Dock, surrounded by the red-roofed, red-bricked buildings of the Annapolis Historic District in contrast to the copper-topped white granite halls of the United States Naval Academy, its chapel dome currently ensconced in a veil of scaffolding.
On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, I took note of the floating inventory you can see within this circle. There’s a Navy base on the north shore of the Severn River where the Academy keeps its fleet of 110-foot training vessels called Yard Patrol Boats, or “YPs.” There were nearly 40 larger cruising boats tied up to the mooring balls in the middle of the harbor, all fairly well mixed between powerboats and sailboats between 30 and 50 feet long. A line of obscenely huge, white-hulled mega-yachts were tied up along the docks at Annapolis Yacht Club and the Yacht Basin. The Market Slip from the Waterfront Hotel to the Market House was lined with powerboats on both sides, large and small, with only one or two sailboats in the slips at City Dock.
The marinas along the Eastport side were filled with a mix of powerboats and sailboats. Six big guys on little jet skis and a handful of broad-brimmed-hatted people scrunched in kayaks or perched upon stand-up paddleboards tried to stay out of the way of the larger boats. Then there were all the commercial vessels coming and going: the Schooners Woodwind I and II, the Harbor Queen tour boat, a pirate ship that takes kids out on birthday cruises, two fishing charter boats, the water taxis zipping back and forth, the Annapolis Harbormaster patrol and pumpout boats, several commercial towboats, and a visiting tall ship.
This was one 360-degree panoramic snapshot on one afternoon. It would be difficult to estimate the number of dollars represented just by the number of hulls in that view, let alone all of the ancillary expenses generated by each one: fuel, docking and mooring fees, money spent on provisioning food and beverage while cruising, and money spent in bars and restaurants while visiting ashore, not to mention the cost of keeping each boat afloat all year round.
America’s Sailing Capital?
An old salt once said that “a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.” Reality is that you should count on spending about 10 percent of the purchase price of the boat on annual maintenance, including repairs, slip fees, insurance and other costs…like upgrading electronic navigation systems with stuff you find at the marine supply store that you can’t resist and have to think up some excuse to tell your wife how you really needed to buy that new $599.99 SIMRAD Cruise 9 chartplotter/fishfinder combo with 83/200 transducer for her personal safety and convenience.
While that panoramic vista seemed to indicate that the number of sailboats is fairly equivalent to the number of powerboats, that view is skewed.
“Annapolis is known as ‘America’s Sailing Capital,’” notes Susan Zellers, Executive Director of the Marine Trades Association of Maryland, “but nationally, only 5 percent of recreational boats are sailboats, and here it’s only 6 percent.”
In a phone interview from her offices at Port Annapolis Marina, Zellers was eager to shoot down the misconception that boating is just for the super-rich. “Sixty percent of boat owners have an annual income of $75,000 or less,” she says, “and 95 percent of the boats in the U.S. sit on trailers.”
A study released by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in 2013 indicated that there were an astonishing 200,000 registered boats in the state and 57,000 unregistered boats. If your boat has a motor of any kind, you need to register it. Unregistered boats are smaller rowboats, dinghies, rowing shells, or paddle-powered kayaks and canoes. I don’t think inner tubes count.
Incidentally, the tall ship at City Dock on that late-May day happened to be the Schooner Lynx, a replica of an 1812-era Baltimore clipper ship similar to the original Pride of Baltimore. In fact, both ships were designed by the same naval architect, an Annapolitan named Melbourne Smith. Melbourne passed in 2018 at the age of 87. It was Melbourne who christened Annapolis as “America’s Sailing Capital.”
I sat next to him one afternoon at the Boatyard Bar and Grill in Eastport, where he perched upon a bar stool that I knew had his name painted on the seat. “Melbourne,” I asked him, “how can Annapolis be the sailing capital of America when most of the boats here are powerboats and Newport has way more sailboats than we have?”
“Ah!” Melbourne grinned wryly from behind his moustache. “Note that I said we are ‘America’s Sailing Capital,’ not ‘The Sailing Capital of America.’ With the frostbite races, we have sailing here year-round,” he explained. “And Newport may have more sailboats, but it’s not a state capital. So, Annapolis literally is ‘America’s Sailing Capital.”
Harbor History
Annapolis became the capital of the colony of Maryland because of its harbor. Itinerant Royal governor Francis Nicholson wanted to move the capital from St. Mary’s City in 1694. That St. Mary’s was called a city was a misnomer to begin with. It was not making much improvement economically since its founding in 1634, as it was far too out of the way for much of what little population there was to get to it to conduct business..
Nicholson chose the tiny village of Arundelton with its well protected harbor as the site for his new capital. He changed the name to Annapolis in honor of Princess Anne, who would one day soon become the last of the Stuart monarchs. As far as I can determine, the harbor was just about as deep in Nicholson’s time as it is now—between 12 and 17 feet deep. Unlike other nearby waterways, the harbor hasn’t been filled in by siltation.
The Stewart Shipyard on the West River, for example, used to build ocean-going ships for the Maryland navy during the Revolutionary War. They would be launched into a creek that was at that time 26 feet deep. That same creek is now only 3 feet deep.
Still, 12 feet deep was plenty deep for most ships in the early 1700s. The Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean connected Annapolis directly with the docks in London and other English ports. Hogsheads tamped full of tobacco filled the cargo holds of the ships heading to there from here, and those same ships sailed back filled with everything the locals couldn’t find locally, including tea. And slaves.
The perilous voyage across the ocean could take weeks or months. Imagine the elites of the town watching the horizon off of Horn Point, waiting for “their ship to come in.”
Around the time of the Revolutionary War, the size of ships had grown both in length and in the depth of their keels, and some of the larger vessels simply couldn’t get to City Dock to unload their cargo. They had to use “lighters,” or smaller rowing boats to haul their treasures ashore. This was when the Port of Baltimore rose to dominance.
Not only did Baltimore have a larger, deeper harbor, but it also had the benefit of freshwater flowing in from Jones Falls, which helped get rid of shipworms, or toredos that bored holes into the hulls of wooden ships. Baltimore was also that much closer to the farmlands in Western Maryland at a time when the export economy was shifting from tobacco to grain.
That is why Baltimore grew up to be a major city with skyscrapers while Annapolis remained a quaint tidewater town with domes and spires.
In the 1800s, steamships started moving goods and people up and down the Bay and the shallow harbor of Annapolis proved to be the perfect depth for side-wheel steamers and perhaps more importantly, bugeye schooners and then skipjacks designed to dredge for oysters. The oyster industry began to expand after the Civil War, and by the 1880s, the oyster harvest peaked at 18 million bushels annually.
There were no fewer than 14 oyster shucking and packing houses on the Annapolis shoreline shown on a map from the 1890s. Eastport boasted several boatyards where skilled shipwrights built traditional workboats and kept them afloat season after season. In the parking lot near the Charthouse Restaurant in Eastport, you can still see the cog of one of the many marine railways that were used to haul schooners and skipjacks out of the water for repair.
Of courses, there were also several yards dedicated to building wooden yachts, but the workboats far outnumbered the pleasure boats in that era.
By the end of World War II, the oyster population was beginning to wane from over-harvesting and diseases caused by invasive pathogens that might have hitch-hiked from overseas in the ballast tanks of cargo ships. As the oyster industry declined, so did the age of wooden boats. It was about this time that fiberglass was invented. Over the next couple of decades, fiberglass became the preferred medium for mass-producing recreational powerboats and sailboats.
Far-sighted entrepreneurs like Arnie Gay began to cater to this new wave of plastic boats, morphing the old boatyards into what we now think of as modern marinas. Some of these provide all the amenities of a first-class resort, including swimming pools, restaurants, and programmed activities for the family. Others concentrate on providing comprehensive services for boat maintenance, from engines to electronics.
And Annapolis Harbor proved the perfect depth for recreational boats big and small, power and sail.
The Future is Now
But the future of the marine industry in our state capital and in fact all of Maryland depends on several steps that the Sage Group study says should be taken to ensure these impacts expand over the coming years, particularly in the face of the recovery from the viral pandemic.
In focus groups and interviews, maritime stakeholders complained the industry faces a dearth of available labor and that the city, county, and state permitting processes are “overly convoluted, time consuming, and expensive,” and that a decline in Anne Arundel County’s water quality would have negative effects on the industry.
The report advised that the Anne Arundel County Maritime Advisory Board should coordinate efforts to expose youth to the idea of a maritime career through career fairs, vocational training programs, and other educational programs at Anne Arundel Community College (AACC).
Industry stakeholders should participate in training programs like the Marine Trades Association of Maryland’s on-the-job training program. “These programs have shown significant promise in encouraging students who do not intend to attend four-year colleges to enter the maritime industry,” the study reports.
Industry stakeholders should also collaborate with AACC to implement the American Boat and Yacht Council (ABYC) Marine Service Technology Program, a standards-based curriculum that would allow students to earn a marine service technician certificate and digital badge of achievement upon completion, and to create needed credit certificates such as a Dockmaster Certificate or other credentials required for non-skilled trade jobs in the industry.
The Sage Group also recommends that Anne Arundel County should supply AACC with approximately $35,000 to purchase the curriculum package, maintain it, and outfit the workshop necessary to implement the ABYC Marine Service Technology Program.
In addition to training new qualified workers, the industry needs to keep bringing newcomers into the lifestyle. “We need to do a better job of getting people out on the water,” Susan Zellers concludes. “We just completed our second boating clinic event at Sandy Point State Park.” The clinic taught new boaters how to launch a boat at a boat ramp, how to operate safely and other basic issues. “It got rave reviews,” she reports. “We ran it three nights and 60 people attended each night.”
These were not what you might think of as typical yachting types. “Our survey shows that the people who heard about it heard about it from DNR, not the boating magazines. Half of the people who attended were people of color. These are people who bought their boats from the guy down the street, their uncle, or somebody they knew; they didn’t get them from a dealer or at the boat shows.”
Between the people who flocked to the boat shows and those who bought boats without ever attending a boat show, the maritime industry doesn’t appear to be in danger of dropping the boom.
