Helen Fretter takes a look at the Young Cruisers Association a collective of ‘young’ cruisers that aims to bring together like-minded cruising sailorsThe Young Cruisers Association is not your average yacht club. In fact, it might be the largest cruising association you\u2019ve never heard of. Its ethos is very different to any other major yachting organisation, and its recent explosive growth reflects some of the biggest shifts in cruising trends.
\nOfficially set up in 2018, the Young Cruisers Association (YCA) now boasts over 10,000 members worldwide. A quick scan of the YCA social media pages shows sailors from the US, Australia, Canada and Britain, along with Sweden, Argentina, Estonia, Ireland, and pretty much everywhere in between. But what defines a \u2018young cruiser\u2019 and what has seen the YCA grow so rapidly?
\nLogan Rowell, one of the founders, explains: \u201cFrom the very beginning, the YCA was built because when my wife and I had started cruising, there were very few pre-retirement cruisers. We had one random season where we ran across three other boats of young cruisers and it was the best winter ever. It totally changed everything.
\n\u201cThe next winter, we were all excited but we didn\u2019t run across any other young cruising boats, and we thought \u2018This has to change, we know they\u2019re out here.\u2019
\n\u201cYou could miss each other by literally one day, if you pull into the anchorage in the afternoon and another boat pulls out that morning. You\u2019ll never know they had kids the same age as your kids and it could have changed your entire cruising season trajectory.\u201d
\nThe YCA was formed. At its hub is a website (youngcruisers.org) which invites sailors to \u2018Join the Stoke\u2019 and \u2018Live the Dream\u2019 by signing up. Once a member, you can find other YCA members in the directory.
\nSundowners on the foredeck; all the family welcome. Photo: YCA
\nEntry is entirely open, and free. Whenever he\u2019s pressed on what makes a \u2018young\u2019 cruiser, Rowell says he defines it as pre-retirement. But YCA members can be of any age, and although they submit a biography with their application, nobody gets rejected.
\nBeing a \u2018young\u2019 cruiser is a state of mind; retirees and older cruisers are well represented by the existing traditional yacht clubs and associations so the YCA aims to represent younger sailors, or \u2013 and Rowell is wary of the clich\u00e9 here \u2013 the young at heart. The majority of members are young couples, families with kids, and solo sailors.
\nThe YCA has grown rapidly, in no small part thanks to social media. Unsurprisingly, many members are prolific social media users, and the YCA Instagram account features envy-inducing galleries of photogenic families and couples in beautiful locations on their yachts.
\nHowever, Rowell has always been very clear that the association is not just for cruising content makers. \u201cWe\u2019re trying desperately to stay away from being an online community. The internet and Instagram is a great way to reach people, but the absolute goal is that people will host events. We\u2019re a platform for everybody to create something as simple as a happy hour, or a beach clean.
\nThe YCA burgee helps connect members in real life as well as the website, and soon a new app. Photo: YCA
\n\u201cObviously a lot of cruisers in general are soloists. They enjoy peace and quiet and getting out on their own. And a lot of young cruisers are not even on any social media platform. We\u2019re truly there for those people that are out there for the love of sailing.\u201d
\nThe YCA burgees are an important part of the association\u2019s identity \u2013 a tangible signal to other cruisers in the same anchorage or marina and part of what makes it a real-life rather than virtual community.
\nHaving zero barrier to entry is important to Rowell and his team, as it helps reach sailors who wouldn\u2019t get any value out of joining a traditional cruising association.
\n\u201cWe had seven YCA New Year\u2019s Eve parties going on around the world. The one that I attended was really cool because there were people there that didn\u2019t say a word. They\u2019re solo sailors or they\u2019re a couple where either the husband or wife is the quiet one, and they came and they were able to be around people. If we had a $100 a year dues, I don\u2019t think that would have happened. They\u2019d have never joined, they\u2019d never have known about the event and they might have just spent that night on their boat.\u201d
\nTouch of a button
\nThe YCA does organise some events, including an annual \u2018Floatchella\u2019 raft-up party in the Exumas, and similar meet-ups around Europe. But its primary goal is to facilitate cruisers making their own connections, and the next stage is to launch a new app which, Rowell says, will hopefully make it significantly easier to find and connect with like-minded cruisers.
\n\u201cThe feedback we get from a terribly clunky and hard-to-use directory on our website is so positive: \u2018Hey, you guys changed our cruising season. We had no idea there were this many people like us out here, and we all ended up getting together\u2019. Or even people that met because of YCA and are now married.
\n\u201cBut I think the most exciting thing for the app is people will actually use it more.\u201d
\nThe app, which will be called Sea People, has attracted the attention of some serious talent from the technology and ecommerce spheres and, after a major round of fundraising, is currently being rebuilt to extend beyond YCA members. It is something of a crossover point for the association, from its current volunteer-led home-grown community towards becoming a serious piece of sailing infrastructure.
\n\u201cThis app is going to be for all boaters, but among other functions it will make something like YCA become this instantaneous, seamless directory where you can hit a quick filter, see where other YCA members are, or other cruising association members are, so you can find your niche, find your people, and build your own friends group.\u201d
\nInternet Wild West
\nAnother innovation coming to YCA members is a discount programme that will offer hefty savings on everything from clothing to hardware like watemakers and winches, to accessories like stand-up paddleboards. The discounts will be based on deliverables \u2013 a tag in an Instagram post for example, though Rowell is again keen to stress the discounts aren\u2019t only available to sailors with popular social media accounts.
\n\u201cThe companies that are working with us are dedicated to supporting the entire community. So there\u2019s no stipulation. You don\u2019t get the discount only if you have a certain amount of followers.\u201d
\nHowever, Rowell is aware that the relationship between the sailing industry and cruising content creators is currently \u201ckind of the Wild West\u201d and that they are well placed to help members and companies navigate this new commercial space (Elayna Carausu and Riley Whitelum of the huge YouTube channel Sailing La Vagabonde are investors in the YCA).
\nMax Campbell is also a YCA member. Photo: YCA
\n\u201cObviously we do have lots of content creating people and we do serve as a good central hub for connecting these creators with companies, and protecting our members in making sure that everything is equitable and also protecting our company partners and making sure what they\u2019re getting out of this.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s an incredible amount of work to put out a YouTube episode once a week, or to stay on top of an Instagram account or TikTok, all these ways people are putting content out which feed the industry. And I\u2019m not sure the industry has truly caught on to how many boats are being sold, new or used, because of these people putting this content out.\u201d
\nPhil and Roxy Johnson\u2019s stunning photos from SV Sonder earned them a 2022 Cruisers Award. Photo: YCA
\nThe association is also starting to use its size to advocate and negotiate for its members \u2013 it\u2019s previously campaigned on anchoring bans in Florida and ocean conservation issues.
\n\u201cThe biggest ones we\u2019re still trying to tackle for our community are insurance, health insurance and boat insurance,\u201d explains Rowell. \u201cThat\u2019s the biggest hurdle for a young cruiser. A pre-retirement cruiser is not necessarily having the boating history and background of sailing for 30 years to make insurance easier. I think we\u2019re finally getting to the size where insurance companies are listening.\u201d
\nAs the membership has grown over the years, Rowell has seen changes in its pre-retirement demographic that reflect wider cruising trends.
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s changed, just in five years, is early on it was monohulls, typically under 40ft, and that started to shift into nicer boats, then people started getting catamarans. And now, especially because of Starlink and better communications, the number of very successful people working from their vessels is what\u2019s really changed.
\nMisconceptions
\n\u201cI would say maybe less than 5% of YCA members are trying to or actually make a living on social media. That\u2019s the first misconception, is that all these people are trying to be YouTubers, they\u2019re trying to be Instagrammers, and that can\u2019t be farther from the truth.\u201d
\n\u201cOver 80% of our members work remotely from their boats, or at least one person on the boat does. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re self-employed. Post-Covid half the world got a hall pass to work from home. And now with Starlink, things have changed again. The Bahamas is a good example: you had a lot of people that were able to work remotely, they\u2019d get to the Bahamas and post up somewhere with a good BTC signal from the local cell phone towers. They could get a hotspot, they could work from their boat, they could work from the bar with wifi, but they didn\u2019t really want to go all the way to the Dominican Republic and then jump down to Panama, because there\u2019s a lot of areas with no connectivity. Starlink has blown that out of the water.\u201d
\nWith success and popularity has come criticism. Rowell says he has received some extraordinary diatribes from older sailors. \u201cWe get hate emails from other people in the cruising community that despise young cruisers. People literally send four pages about how they worked their whole life, they saved for retirement, they had a full career and raised children in a school system and why being on a sailboat \u2013 and essentially being a bum \u2013 when you\u2019re young is totally wrong!\u201d
\n\u201cWhat people don\u2019t realise is that a lot of these younger cruisers are working from their boats. They\u2019re not rich kids who don\u2019t have a career.\u201d
\nBut above all, the YCA is all about attitude. An attitude that\u2019s a bit sweary, likes a beer or two, non-curmudgeonly. \u201cAge matters none. If you fit the typical cruiser profile then fine. If you don\u2019t then there\u2019s a good chance that you\u2019ll find your people in the YCA.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Helen Fretter takes a look at the Young Cruisers Association a collective of ‘young’ cruisers that aims to bring together like-minded cruising sailorsThe Young Cruisers Association is not your average yacht club. In fact, it might be the largest cruising … <\/p>\n