Brisbane Boat Show

[charleville]

good to see some fishing seminars but where were the boating seminars?? I

That is a very good point and very logical too, especially as it is ostensibly a boating show. As an aside, I remember how the boat show way back in the seventies used to have a lot of sailing craft on display also but they don't seem to feature much these days. The Brisbane Boat Show is looking more like the Brisbane Powerboat show.

It is interesting to compare the boat show with the Gardening show that the ABC stages at the same venue and which is absolutely packed with people. At the Gardening show, they seem to run multiple seminars concurrently.

I saw that the boat show did have a cooking demo in a separate place but it is true that there are no boating seminars per se. On some years, the main seminar program does include a session on outboard motor maintenance usually delivered by Gary Howard. It is real beginner stuff and good for beginners but one could imagine just what a drawcard it might be to hold a separate boating seminar stage with not only the beginner stuff but also individual sessions on individual brands/motors plus a panel session with the leading mechanics from say, Springwood Marine representing Mercs, Leisure Marine representing Evinrude/Johnston, etc handling questions from the floor. Certainly the session that Leisure Marine ran a few weeks ago at their premises and which included a session by their head mechanic, Dallas, attracted a lot of interest and a lot of questions. Such guys are not necessarily natural presenters so they may not do a quality standalone presentation but a panel answering questions from the floor might be a killer session, as it was at Leisure Marine that night.

I no longer go to the Sanctuary Cove boat show because it is such a hassle to get there with trains and interconnecting buses and even if you park, you still have to take the bus to get there. All too hard - and add to that there is no seminar program, there is not a lot of reason for the average boat owner to go.

On the other hand, I have made multiple trips to the Brissy boat show and T&T show in the past because the seminar program drew me in on multiple days, so much so that Bill Corten got to giving me a wave when he saw me as a regular in the audience before he ever met me. I am finding now though that as excellent as the presentations by Webby, Leanne, Nugget, Jason Comino, and a few others are, there is only so many times that I can watch the same material being presented and so I am looking for variety and more topics.

As it stands, I have been thinking about not going next year unless there is a whole lot of new material . I only went to see Jason Comino's session on Bay Snapper this year and it was excellent. By chance, I happened to watch Wayne Kampe's session on Moreton Bay mackerel and tuna and that was stunning as well.

If there were two or more seminar programs happening across the venue, I could imagine going every day - but not if there is just the one seminar program which I have seen most of and would need to kill an hour or two between favored sessions looking at the same boats over and over again.

Ah well, just my 2 cents worth.