Welcome Aboard

As I pulled into town, I was suddenly beset with uncertainty, trying to recall my 2019 training as I thought to myself, “Did von Weisenberger say judges should take no coffee on tasting day?” The water master himself dispelled my spoiled-palate worries, when we judges met him for lunch at Tari’s Cafe, an upscale-casual dining institution in Berkeley Springs. I was relieved to be reminded that we’re only asked to abstain from coffee (or anything else that could alter our taste senses) for a few hours before serving as judges.

After lunch, we reconvened at the Country Inn’s Parkview Garden Room, a conference-andwedding space notable for the three living trees around which the room was built. Training took about an hour. It started with von Weisenberger explaining the two-step process of getting bottled water.

“Some water is rainfall and snow melt, some of it comes from geysers, some of it comes from springs and creeks—from geothermal sources like we have right here in Berkeley Springs, even icebergs,” he said, “so the origins of water is the first step. The second step is what that water goes through before it ends up in a bottle. Most of the time it goes into the ground. The terroir is what gives water its character—those minerals, those trace elements are coming from rock strata, and those may be imparted into the water over eons. Sometimes water surfaces after five, 10, 15 years; other times it might be thousands of years.” The result, he said, “is like a fingerprint. No two natural waters are the same.”

Recalling the skepticism I’d had before the 2019 water tasting, I asked von Weisenberger if it might be best to reward the waters that failed to alert my senses at all?

“You’re using all your senses,” von Weisenberger replied. “Your goal is not to find anything that’s distracting or disagreeable. You don’t want to have anything that’s not pleasant, and if you find something that you see or you smell that you like, then you give it the scores you want. But then when you get into flavors, aftertaste, mouthfeel—all those are things that your senses pick up that they like a lot, or not.”

The judging system von Weisenberger teaches is derived from the one he employed in a 1980 tasting of San Francisco-area tap waters undertaken by the San Francisco Chronicle. “I went around with a reporter, and we collected these waters,” he recalled, “and we brought them to the Fairmount Hotel, and we put together a panel of judges, overseen by a man named Professor William Bruvald,” a professor of public health at University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a water-tasting system for NASA to evaluate “the acceptability of minerals in water for astronauts, as far as taste goes, because they wanted to find out how much they had to purify recycled water for drinking.”

The judges at the 1980 event were recruited from water-related occupations. “They had a SCUBA diver, someone who worked at an aquarium shop, a guy who was selling waterbeds,” von Weisenberger said. “The point was, when you sort of focus in on water, it doesn’t matter what background you come from, those differences in taste stand out.”

At the Berkeley Springs event, the judging goes on for hours. Thanks to the pandemic, the number of entrants this year was less than the 100-plus seen the past, but 13 municipal waters, 13 sparkling waters, 39 spring waters, and six purified waters from 19 states, three Canadian provinces, and 14 foreign countries still added up. We entered our scores on tablets, but also

Judges prepared for tasting. A blue star commemorates long-time tasting organizer Jeanne Mozier, who passed away last year.

filled in paper forms in case of a technological malfunction. Every now and then, we nibbled on water crackers to replenish our palates.

The Parkview Garden Room was not as packed as it had been in prior years’ tastings, but the online viewership via a live Facebook feed added a new sense of worldwide interest in the event. For the first time, there was no “water rush” at the end of the event, when a display of hundreds of bottled waters is descended upon by the attending crowd, who are invited to grab as many cans and bottles as they can carry with them.

After all the tabulations, the 2021 winners were announced. Fuji no Tennensui Sarari from Japan’s Mt. Fuji won best bottled spring water; it is produced by Tokai Corporation, a Japanese company that has won numerous medals in past years. The top municipal water in the world went to Australia’s Rossarden, in Tasmania, while the U.S. winner was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, serving the Los Angeles region. Fleck Sparkling Mineral Water from New Zealand topped the list of bubbly waters, while the gold medal in purified waters went to Santa Barbara, Calif.’s Ophora Hyper-Oxygenated Water, which also won gold in 2018.

Worth mentioning among the purified winners, since it won the gold last year and is from the Chesapeake Bay watershed, is this year’s silver medalist: Waterfy Me of Gaithersburg, Md.

My duties now complete, I bought a bourbon from the Country Inn’s bar and hobnobbed with some of the judges. In light of being fully vaccinated, I considered doing something I haven’t done since before the pandemic: going to check out some live music, in this case at the Berkeley Springs Brewing Company. (I changed my mind, old fogey that I am, and went back to the cabin to sleep under the stars instead.) But first, as a judge, I was permitted to select some bottled waters to take home.

I chose five, based on my personal preference for non-plastic packaging: Kariba Premium Spring Water from Ontario, Canada, in a resealable can; Antipodes Natural Artesian Water from New Zealand, in a clear bottle; The Mountain Valley Spring Water from Hot Springs, Arkansas, in a screw-top aluminum bottle; The WaterWell Purified Water from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in a resealable swing-top bottle; and Svalbardi Polar Iceberg Water from Norway (which is melted from iceberg’s freshly calved off of glaciers), in a clear bottle with a gift box.

Armed with a collection of five waters from three continents, I went home to Baltimore and decided to try von Weisenberger’s water-rating system on my two daughters, aged nine and 11; two neighborhood kids, aged nine and 12; and two adults (my wife, and the father of the other two kids).

I designed and printed up the judging forms, held a training session to walk them through the particulars, and filled six glasses for each judge—one for each of the five waters, and a sixth filled with Baltimore tap water.

The winner? Antipodes by far, with Svalbaldi coming in second. Antipodes costs about $10 a bottle, and Svalbaldi can command $150 per bottle, so there’s something about these precious waters that earned them accolades in the first-ever “Butchers Hill Neighborhood Water Tasting.” Baltimore tap tied for third with The WaterWell.

As von Weisenberger likes to say, “The consistency in winners from year to year with different panels of judges validates the choices” made by the water tastings. Even with kids as judges—because guess what? Antipodes won a gold medal at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting in 2018. There’s definitely something to this water-tasting business. Discernment and concentration abound as the judges try to detect and rank the qualities of drinking waters from around the world.

Van Smith, a Baltimore writer, has adopted “Judge Van Smith” as his moniker since receiving his water-tasting certification.

Younger boaters, women, and new families join the Bay boating scene.

by Ann Levelle

It’s no surprise that in 2020, when being outdoors was the best way to spend our free time, people were itching to get out on the water. Be it seasoned boaters who could cruise the Bay while working from home, kayakers and SUP enthusiasts able to take daily paddles instead of commuting, or folks brand new to boating altogether—the surge in boating at all levels over the past 18 months has been nothing short of historic.

During the summer of 2020, boats were flying off the shelves (so to speak), pushing boat dealers’ inventories down to sometimes nothing, and forcing new-boat production times to historically long waits. According to the National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA), more than 310,000 new powerboats were sold in 2020, an estimated 12 percent increase compared to 2019—both levels that the recreational boating industry has not seen since before the Great Recession in 2008.

Meet the New Crew

So, what could be better than an historic boat-buying boom? The fact that the new buyers are younger and ready to bring friends and family to boating as well. This is a source of excitement to the industry, where there has long been an aim to get younger people involved in boating.

According to Takemefishing.org, a national nonprofit that aims to get people (especially families) out on the water, this new generation of boat buyers “participate for relaxation and family time; are highly social in person and online; are younger, more urban and more diverse; and bring their kids into the sport.”

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources reports that the number of registered boats for owners under 40 rose by just over 2,355 vessels, a 13 percent increase from 2019. Similarly, registrations for people under 50 rose by 4,300 vessels, an increase of 11 percent. Meanwhile, numbers of registered boats to owners in the 50-to-65+ age ranges decreased in similar numbers over the past three years.

An even better one-up? Women are often taking the lead. According to NMMA, the number of first-time boat buyers reached

415,000 in 2020. These first-time buyers are 1.5 times more likely to be female than other groups, and are also younger on average.

Katy Haukebo is one of them. Haukebo, 37, along with her husband and three kids, ages 6, 4 and 1, bought a new-to-them Chaparral 215 SSi last July. The couple, who recently moved from Baltimore to Edgewater, Md., had been talking about buying a boat since they met in 2006, but Haukebo says the tipping point was the pandemic. “We have three young boys who have always been outdoorsy, adventurous, active kids, and not being able to go anywhere or do anything made us all a little stir crazy. Being on the boat was a way for us to get out ... and feel like things were normal again.”

While Haukebo and her husband grew up boating on inland lakes, Katy Did is their first family boat, on which they like to cruise around and explore, “and hope to make some friends to raft up.” As for the boat’s name, says Haukebo, “we polled our friends on Facebook and this was one of the suggestions. We ultimately went with it because I did all the work of finding and researching the boat, marina, etc.”

The couple had to act fast when they found the right boat, Haukebo says. “We had already decided we wanted a used boat with a little cabin so the kids could rest and nap out of the sun, and something that wasn’t so big that we wouldn’t be comfortable driving and docking it.”

Above: The Haukebo family was looking for ways to beat pandemic boredom; Left: Katy Haukebo poses on her new boat, Katy Did

Speaking of the Right Boat

Other factors that help attract a younger crowd are that today’s boats are simpler to use, and access to information on boating skills and maintenance is a lot easier to come by. “You don’t have to be a yachtie to know how to operate [a boat],” says CBM publisher John Stefancik. These days, he adds, “you need to get some basic experience and maybe you take a class or two and you can just jump right in.”

Stefancik says that many new boats of all configurations come with amenities once reserved for large cabin cruisers. They “have hot water, they’ve got running water, they’ve got air conditioning, they’ve got heat, they’ve got AC electrical and DC electrical.” Before, he chuckles, “if you wanted all that stuff, you had to have a 48-foot Carver.”

Mark Schulstad, owner of Pocket Yacht Company, which sells Ranger Tugs and Cutwater Boats, agrees. “It seems like some of the designs of boats have reached out a little bit to younger people—they want to fish and do water sports, whether it’s skiing, tubing, family activities, just being on the water overall.”

“Twenty, thirty years ago, I kept trading people up into these big motor yachts...then it got to the point where

people were downsizing all the time,” says Schulstad. Some people were aging and their bigger boats were too complex. But other buyers, after owning center-consoles and open boats, now have families and want to know, how many kids does this boat sleep? And how many heads? “I think they’re really discovering boating like it was in the past,” he says.

The New School Gets Schooled

Another shift in the boating market (albeit not just in the past year and a half) is the increase in learning opportunities available to both new and seasoned boaters. From boat show seminars to semester-long courses, and even minutes-long YouTube videos, novice boaters now have knowledge at the tips of their fingers, and aren’t afraid to use it.

“Our offices are here with our sister company, Annapolis School of Seamanship, and they have a line out the door of people who want to come in and learn about various subjects,” says Stefancik. “They’re not shy about saying, ‘Hey, I want to take a class.’ And I think in the old days, well, nobody took a class.”

That’s to say nothing of looking on YouTube. Before you scoff, remember that nearly every manufacturer, dealer, boating magazine, club, or boating association you can think of has videos on YouTube, covering basic maintenance, boating news, boat reviews, you name it.

In addition to classes in person and online, dealers are here to help. Whereas once you might have bought a boat and been handed the keys with a congratulatory handshake, now you can be given quite a bit of training. For buyers at Schulstad’s Pocket Yacht Company, “we offer up to three days of orientation,” he says, which can include “one day of kind of dockside, with all the systems and components and demonstration of all the equipment that is working properly.

The Haukebo children relax in the V-berth

And from there, it’s a sea trial and showing them the proper way to trim the boat ... and then evolves into talking about tying up the boat properly, and all those sorts of things.”

Hitting the Clubs

For those who can’t afford a brandnew boat, or weren’t able to find the perfect used boat during the COVID boom, boating clubs have become increasingly popular. Freedom Boat Club, which has outlets around the country, including several locations in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., saw the surge in membership firsthand. Since May 2019, Freedom memberships have grown by 61 percent across its 250 locations. Not to mention, the average Freedom Boat Club member is almost three years younger than the average Brunswick boat buyer. (Brunswick acquired Freedom Boat Club in 2019.) And in 2020, women represented 35 percent of the membership base at Freedom.

For boating club members, getting out on the water is simple, and it eliminates the tedious parts of owning a boat, including maintenance and slip fees. But that’s not the only type of club hoping for a younger membership. Yacht clubs around the Chesapeake are vying for younger members who will bring friends and family along with them, and are putting more emphasis on social activities along with racing and cruising.

Koralina McKenna, 33, has been a member of the Annapolis Yacht Club since 2018, just before the club opened

its vast new facilities along the Annapolis waterfront. She and her husband James, 39, have been a part of the sailing scene since their early 20s, but were the first of their close friends to join AYC. “I felt like my husband and I sort of broke the seal with our friend group,” says McKenna. “We joined and since then I think we’ve had six of our close friends join. For about a year there was just us.” But now, she adds, “I feel confident that I’ll run into another young person that I know.”

The Annapolis Yacht Club has been quite successful in gaining new members under 35, which includes a lot of families with young children. “So now the question is, ‘We have all these young people, and how do we get them to be involved?’ ” McKenna says. AYC now hosts family-friendly activities such as dive-in movie nights, an Opti Mom regatta for moms who sail dinghies, and plenty of other social activities for kids and parents at the club’s new facilities, which include a Youth Club room, pool, and activity center in addition to its new sailing center.

But other young members are there to make sure it’s not just families represented on the young boating front. AYC has a very active cruising fleet, says McKenna. “I’m on the committee specifically to represent people under 45 that don’t have children.” In addition to regular happy hours and cruises, she adds, “we started a lot of activities for day boats to come and hang out ... so they can still get home in the afternoon and sort of get that glimpse [of the cruising boat life].”

Koralina McKenna and husband, James (standing, left) at anchor with young friends at an AYC Cruising Club Rendezvous.

33-year-old McKenna enjoying the cruising life.

Here to Stay

Between low lending rates, accessible learning opportunities, and a pandemic that urged people to an active outdoor lifestyle, new, younger boaters will likely continue to enter the boating world. And as younger folks often do, they will likely come up with new and exciting ways to share the sport. Publisher John Stefancik agrees. “Boating is more accessible than ever,” he says. Let’s all hop on board and enjoy the ride.

Editor-at-Large Ann Levelle lives in Annapolis with her family. They missed last year’s boat boom due to low inventory on the used boat scene, but are still enjoying their 13-foot Whaler and Optis for the kids.