Sport: Boat Fever

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On the Rocks. Harsen himself has not yet bought a house, lives with his wife in a simply furnished apartment overlooking the harbor in nearby Fort Lauderdale, keeps a weather eye on the passing parade of boats ("When 70% of them are not Chris-Crafts, I'll know something is wrong"). Tanned, -blue-eyed May Smith. 51, is a Smith only by marriage, so she is understandably lacking in some of the finer points of salty boatsmanship (she insists on calling the galley a "kitchen.'' and on cruises she insists on plugging all boat drains at night to keep out snakes). May likes to tease her father-in-law about the time they were cruising in Lake Huron, and she warned him to look out for underwater boulders. "Don't worry." said Jay. "I know where all the rocks are in this place." Just then the boat ground up over a rock. "See?" said Skipper Smith with admirable aplomb. "There's one now."

Though Chris-Craft has the longest history and is the acknowledged leader in the inboard field (its sales are more than three times those of Owens, its closest competitor), the boom is big enough for all. Owens sold $12 million worth of boats last year v. $1 million in 1953. Such companies as Matthews, Wheeler and Richardson, who specialize in custom-quality boats, have shared handsomely in the general boom.

Nor is the boom confined to inboard power boats. The big schooners of yesteryear are down to a handful, but they have been replaced many times over by 35-and 45-ft. yawls and ketches, better suited to an age dominated by the income tax and the high cost of other people's labor. Harbors from Maine to California swarm with new thousands of prams, skiffs and small sailing craft. Lumped under the heading of non-powered boats, such craft increased from 600,000 in 1947 to 1,530,000 in 1958.

But numerically, by far the biggest noise in the boom is made by outboards, which have undergone a revolution of their own in the last ten years. Traditionally, outboards were low-powered, designed with an eye on trolling fishermen. But after World War II, watching the growing trend to family boating, manufacturers began to produce more powerful engines that were designed to drive a boat big enough for the whole family and perky enough to pull a water skier. Since then, outboard motors have become bigger and bigger, now range up to 75 h.p. Equipped with electric starters, a remote steering wheel and gear shift, a modern outboard runabout can give any frustrated householder a heady sense of power for as little as $1,500. Today, some 5,000,000 Americans own outboards v. 1,300,000 in 1947. Last year Outboard Marine, a combine that makes well over half of all outboard motors in the U.S. through its Johnson. Evinrude and Gale divisions, produced $131 million in outboards. Chris-Craft's Harsen Smith does not consider the outboards a threat. Outboards. he feels, are to inboard boats as farm teams are to baseball's major-league teams. Says he: "It's the nature of boating to step up to a larger boat with sleeping room aboard."