Hurricane Sandy might not have stopped the 2012 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, but its legacy is having an effect on the show’s scheduling starting in 2015.
Show dates will be pushed back a week, starting on the first Thursday in November, in the hope that the delay will help avoid the bad weather the area is sometimes prone to in the fall.
“The weather charts show that even though it’s just a week later it considerably reduces the chances of the torrential rain and high winds,” Efrem “Skip” Zimbalist III, who owns show producer Show Management, Soundings Trade Only Today. (Zimbalist also is chairman and CEO of Active Interest Media, the parent company of Soundings Trade Only.) “We don’t get them often in the third week, as we did last year, but sometimes it does happen. That’s the major thing we can control is moving the dates a week later.”
Beginning in 2015 the show will start on the first Thursday in November instead of the last Thursday in October.
Last year, Hurricane Sandy’s storm bands wrought some havoc on exhibitors and attendees. The storm affected various exhibitors differently, Show Management senior vice president and COO Dane Graziano told Trade Only after the show.
Marine Industries Association of South Florida president Kristina Hebert told attendees at the 2012 FLIBS opening breakfast that boaters had invented ways to defy the weather. “I know everybody’s talking about weather and it always kind of makes me chuckle when we do,” Hebert told the crowd. “Boating was invented by us humans to buck the system.”
This year’s Fort Lauderdale show, which takes place Oct. 31-Nov.4, naturally falls later than usual, as it also will do next year, Zimbalist said. In 2014, it opens Oct. 30.
This article originally appeared in our sister publication, Trade Only Today, and can be viewed here.
