A thought or two...

Yesterday over at NAS they mentioned the Sail Innovation Awards and it got me thinking...

Sadly, most awards these days given by an industry to itself has bugger all to do with design, quality or innovation but does have a lot to do with money. Running an article in a magazine about the "Best of" or the like, is really a pretty good means of selling those folks who make the gear some advertising.

In fact, more often than not, when you see a blurb about a great piece of gear in a magazine these days it is lifted word for word out of the press release that the company in question sent to the magazine. Though if you read the resulting article you get the impression that the editors have actually used the product and done some testing. I know this because those companies send me the same press releases... Hell, I even get press releases for products that don't even exist (except on paper) of the vaporware sort and it is interesting to see some magazine enthuse about how wonderful something is when we all know they are simply nonexistent.

Just my take, but before I'd bestow any awards on new products, I'd actually like a chance to see them in use on a real boat as opposed to in a press release or sitting in all its prototypical wonder in a glass case at a boat show. I'd like to up the ante and see how it fares in actual use for some period of time and go all Practical Sailor on their ass. Truth is, I'd really love a whole different sort of yearly awards of the negative sort... and the award for the most over-priced-silly-expensive new gen anchor goes to... Yeah, I'd pay to read that issue!

Of course, I'm not the guy folks are going to send any gear to test as they don't want to hear what I have to say, and without the carrot of placing advertising or withdrawing advertising dollars to Boat Bits, they can't control the outcome.

Which brings us back around to the Sail Innovation awards. Looking at the products mentioned I simply don't see anything innovative in the lot (with one exception) unless you consider "innovation" as a means of replacing perfectly good gear with more expensive stuff that mostly does the same old same. The only exception to that on the list as I see it would be the Seldén reversible winch. It is such a smart idea one wonders why no one has done it before (and if I ever need to replace my bombproof stainless 40-year old Barient 26's I will certainly consider them).

I really would like to do a yearly Boat Bits award thingy that would focus on real innovation of products that made sailing/cruising more accessible, simpler, affordable, and safer but I simply don't see that sort of gear coming out of the industry these days...

... And that, dear readers, is a seriously sad state of affairs.

Listening to Sail Away

So it goes...