Boating industry thriving right now in Michigan despite pandemic

(FOX 2) - In the state of Michigan, boating is huge. But would you expect boat sales to be skyrocketing during the pandemic? Because they are. 

"I thought that the COVID virus was going to scare people. They were going to say, 'I'm not spending any excess money. Boating is the last thing on my mind,'" says Bryan Mason, Interim General Manager with Tommy's Boats in Detroit. 

But that hasn't been the case at all. 

"People started to realize that normality was going to have to take place. People realized that their vacations were going to be canceled. So they figured, how are we going to spend that money that we already were going to plan on spending, but yet still keep our family together?"

While, initially, the forced shut down was scary it ultimately started to work in their favor.

"I really do think, due to the fact that everything was shut down, the only real thing they could do to kind of get that family together and still enjoy their summer was to be on a boat," Mason says. "We knew, whether it was this summer or next summer or the summer after that, boating was going to take place again."

In fact, the bounce-back has been so strong it actually created a different problem.

"The biggest problem that we've got right now is that we have storage customers, we have sales customers, we've got service customers. We have probably 600 boats. So, getting 600 plus boats home has been a struggle."

And if all this boat talk has made you thirsty, you can get into a used boat for as low as $5,000. New boats can cost you as low as $25,000.