More than 100 of you were kind enough to take Mad Mariner's first-ever Reader Survey last week, a 13-question quiz geared to provide some basic information about our online community, such as Who are we? and What do we want?
We first need to thank those of you who took the survey. It was so successful that we probably will make this a regular feature. The answers help us calibrate the site to your interests, and we'll produce a much better product if we do this a few times each year.
Of course, it is only fair – and fun – if we share some of the results afterward.
We don't generally devote front-page space to news involving the site, but we thought this was an exception (we also gave you the Legoland slideshow, just for kicks).
WHO ARE WE?
Who we are as Mad Mariner readers is relatively simple: Most of us are men (97 percent) who own a boat (92.5 percent).
We are split almost dead even between power (42.5 percent) and sail (40 percent) – and a rugged minority (17.5 percent) enjoy both. But don't discount these "have it both ways" types. They account for almost one in five.
We own an amazing diversity of boats–too many, in fact, to list them all here. But to give you an idea, on the power side, it ranged from Chris Craft, Grady White and C-Dory to Tollycraft, Hatteras, Grand Banks, Kadey-Krogen and Nordhavn. On the sail side, Catalina, Freedom and Cal were represented, as well as Beneteau, Bristol, Swan, Hans Christian and Pacific Seacraft.
There were at least two home-built boats–and one Diesel Duck (we badly want to meet that guy, but the survey was anonymous).
The smallest boat was 13 feet and the largest was a whopping 71 feet. The average length was 33 feet. The oldest boat was built in 1961. The newest were 2008 models–and there were five of them!
WHAT DO WE DO?
What we do on these boats also provided some interesting answers.
More than half of us take day trips, overnighters and weekend cruises. About one in three of us likes to fish.
Almost one third of us take longer trips, which last more than two weeks–and an equal number plan to do extended cruising this year. Broaden that to the next two years, and a much larger number (58 percent) plan to get out there on the blue.
One in 10 of us lives aboard and one in five plans to do so in the next two years. One third of us plan to buy a boat in that timeframe–something advertisers like Boats.com should like–and about the same percentage plan to get a captain's license.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
What we want as readers is a more complicated line of questioning, but there were definitely some good answers here too.
Large numbers of us "can't get enough" stories about marine electronics (44 percent); seamanship and skills (43 percent); do-it-yourself projects (42.5 percent); navigation and equipment reviews (both 42 percent).
Hopefully, we are giving you what you want, with two marine electronics blogs–Panbo and Hardwired–and entire sections devoted to projects, seamanship and navigation. Of course, we'll continue to focus our efforts to give you more.
We are also actively pursuing more stories about equipment, specifically truthful reviews that don't pull punches. Look to our series on navigation software, Hard Facts on Software, as one example. And we're publishing a four-part series this week on how to buy and maintain sails.
Interestingly, almost half of us said that they "sometimes" check out stories about women in boating. We are just reading between the lines here, but we took that to mean that many of us have a wife or girlfriend who shares the boat and that we sometimes wonder how to get her more involved. We plan to write more about that, too.
If you are one of our small–and hopefully growing–percentage of female readers, you are vastly underserved by the publishing industry and we realize that. We truly want to give you something you enjoy reading on a regular basis, so please stay tuned–and don't hesitate to contact us if you have ideas.
INTERESTING MISERS
Of course, that goes for men too. We would like to hear from any of our readers – or all of them – when they have an idea for a story, interesting photos or something we should be covering.
As you might guess, any good survey is also going to reveal some oddities. In our case, it was Question 8, "How much did you spend on boating last year?"
The majority of answers fell into the predictable categories, meaning tens of thousands of dollars–and often far, far more. But there were a small group of guys (5 percent) who said they managed to spend less than $1,000.
Had we known this answer was coming, we definitely would have included some follow-up questions. At the top of our list: "How the hell did you do that?" and "Can you teach us how?"
