Selling Boats Versus Selling Doom
By David Gee
The boats were there. The dealers showed up. The buyers came. The doom stayed home.
The 2026 Bay Bridge Boat Show, the traditional kickoff to the Chesapeake boating season, ran April 17–19 at Safe Harbor Narrows Point in Grasonville, MD. Some 250 powerboats – from center consoles to cruisers – lined the docks just east of Annapolis.
Walking the show this year, you could certainly hear some of the industry’s familiar chorus these days: soft demand, fragile consumer confidence, bloated inventory, pump prices north of where anyone wants them.
Then I got a dose of optimism to match the sunny 85-degree blue sky day when I talked to David Baumgartner, who I knew from the Boating Industry Top 100 awards.
Baumgartner is a second-generation owner and former president of Riverside Marine, the Baltimore-area dealership that placed #3 in the 2025 Boating Industry Top 100 and is marking 50 years in business this year. He’s since brought his son Jason into third-generation ownership. And they aren’t buying – or selling – the doom story.
“There are a lot of people out there ready to buy boats. You just have to bring them in and make it happen. I think these days dealerships have to be event-driven. We had another event a couple of weeks ago, before this show, and we were pleasantly surprised at the high amount of traffic we had. And we sold lots of boats from it.”
That’s the part the gloom headlines miss. Buyers haven’t disappeared. The passive playbook has.
“You have to be aggressive, and you have to make it happen,” Baumgartner said. “But there are buyers out there. We feel real good about the direction of the season. Our used boat sales are on par with what we thought they would be and our new boat sales are up quite a bit from our projections. Our inventory is fairly clean so it’s a good position to be in overall.”
Clean inventory. Used sales tracking. New sales beating projections. That’s not bravado – that’s a successful dealer reading their own numbers in real time.
I pressed him on gas prices. If the consumer is as fragile as the headlines suggest, surely pump prices would be top of mind at a spring show.
“This is our first boat show since the pump prices jumped, and so far, I haven’t heard a single person mention it. If you sell the boat the right way, I really don’t think it’s an issue. Also, with the improvements they have made in fuel efficiency in today’s four-stroke outboards, it is more economical to run a boat today than it was 10 or 15 years ago for sure. Again, if you sell it the right way you can explain that.”
The operative phrase: the right way. Dealers who’ve trained their teams to handle the fuel-cost objection watch it evaporate. Dealers who haven’t, watch customers walk.
Baumgartner’s bottom line is the kind of summary you only get from someone who’s been on the dock for five decades:
“Boaters are going to boat. They still want to invest in a boat. They still want to be on the water. And the rest is just noise.”
Some in the recreational boating industry will spend 2026 reacting to the noise. Dealers like Baumgartner and Riverside Marine will instead spend it running events, chasing buyers, and moving inventory – and will simply be too busy to hear a word of it.
