Toronto Boat Show - Footprint Boats

The family and I went to the Toronto Boat Show yesterday.  It was so much fun!  We have gone for the past 3 years.  We always pack lots of food, slip on shoes (no shoes allowed on the boats so you take them off a lot), and water.  It is fun to day dream about the day when we can buy our own boat.  Cale is sold on a pontoon party boat and, if paired with a couple of jet skis for fast fun, I'm in agreement.  That is until we were exploring the sailboats and from the railing saw a tent trailer.  A tent trailer at the boat show!  What?

This is what we saw:

This is a Footprint Boat. As described on the website:

The Footprint Boat was created to revolutionize the boating world. It solves the problem of affordable family accommodation on the water. Using a form must follow function philosophy, this design focuses on what it must do, not how it should look. The Footprint Boat is a lightweight, low maintenance, fuel efficient, affordable “working man’s yacht.”

I can't say that we were immediately in love but immediately intrigued may have been the better description.  When we saw this boat it also had bikes on the roof of the tent trailer.  If our car below is any indication, packed for a camping trip out east, of how this family rolls, the bikes really caught my attention.

on our way to Grand Manan, NB, Bay of Fundy

We camp.  We love camping. We car camp. We also camp via aluminum boats with our friends.  This is the on-the-water version of car camping.  We load the boats with as much stuff as they can carry and boat to an island in northern Ontario and camp on crown land.  It's great - more conveniences than full back-country camping without the people and rules of a campground (we still love Killbear though:).  The problem is you have to load up the boat and then unload the boat and set up camp.  With this crazy contraption you could load it up at home, launch it, get to where you want and then simply run the front end onto a beach.  Done.  Stay one night if you want and then go explore some more.  This is incredible appealing to me.

The boat has movable pontoons so it is narrow enough to tow but wide enough to be stable on the water, it only needs 14" of water and sleeps 6.  This is pretty cool.

After the boat show we went for supper and talked about this boat. We love the tent trailer part and the concept but there are a couple of items we didn't like.  This is the prototype so I'm optimistic that all of our changes will be taken into consideration and we'll buy one shortly after I graduate.

Here are our thoughts:

• The front is ugly.  A lot of ugly. It reminds me of a SnowCat. I would love to learn why it was designed this way - if you know please share. 

• Perhaps a pontoon boat inspired front would be nicer. Add a full camper top enclosure to this puppy and its a winner.  The benches could still be used for sleeping but the option for a more open boating experience is there.
• A swim platform.  I didn't see any reference to a swim platform on the Footprint Boats.  As a family with little fish for children this is an important feature.  The pontoon boat front with swim platform would fix this problem too.
• Last but not least is that the tent trailer section and the front section enclose as 2 individual compartments.  If it is raining, I'm not going to want to run in between these 2 sections.  It's like going from the dining tent to the main tent.  If these 2 sections could be enclosed together for 1 giant party room - that would be perfect.

It really took us a long time to wrap our heads around this boat.  I'd love to hear what you think.