GRAYLING, Mich. — When charter captain Mike Pittiglio pushes the twin throttles of Muskie Mania to the three-quarter position, the 31-foot Sea Ray gets about eight-tenths of a mile per gallon at 30 mph.
“Used to be a guy with a 30-35 footer on Lake St. Clair could load the family aboard and run to Cedar Point for a weekend,” Pittiglio said, referring to the Lake Erie theme park about 75 miles from his dock on Lake St. Clair. “Not any more. Today, you could fly the entire family down to Disney World for the fuel you’d use to go to Cedar Point and probably have enough left for a couple of motel rooms.
“Charter captains like me don’t have a choice, but I don’t see the average private owner using his boat anywhere near as much this year,” said Pittiglio, who figures an average eight-hour muskellunge charter this summer will cost him $300 for fuel.
Running most 30-35 foot family cruisers from Lake St. Clair to Cedar Point and back would consume about 150-200 gallons of gasoline. At today’s marina prices of about $4.70 a gallon, that works out to $700-$950, and some energy experts predict that trip will cost $800-$1,100 before summer ends.
The thought of gasoline prices reaching $5 per gallon, and $5.50 or more in marinas, has many boat dealers, marina operators and boat owners nervous about the future.
Mike Litt isn’t one of them. The man who bought Keane’s Marina in Detroit three years ago, “just before the economic toilet flushed,” said boaters might not run as far as they used to, but they won’t give up their passion.
“The biggest impact isn’t fuel,” Litt said. “It’s paying $3,000 a year for a well. It’s making the monthly payment for the boat. We are seeing more repossessions. But our transient business is way up. We fill up on weekends with people from Lexington [on Lake Huron] and Put-in-Bay [on Lake Erie].
“They come as a group, and they get a weekend membership in our private club. We put up a big party tent they can use for socializing. We have a limo service to take them to shows and restaurants downtown, and we can arrange for a bus to take a group to a baseball game or anywhere else.
“The new normal is going to be shorter distances and going out maybe to just have dinner on the water. I’ve heard people say they can fly to Las Vegas cheaper than running the boat to Put-in-Bay. That doesn’t mean anything, because flying to Vegas isn’t boating.”
Tom Raguso, who owns Sun Sport Marine near the mouth of the Clinton River in Harrison Township, Mich., agrees with Litt.
“An increase in fuel prices really doesn’t affect my customer base,” Raguso said. “Most of them are pretty successful people. They’re not happy about higher prices, but they have a passion for boating.
“They might not make trips to Mackinac Island or Georgian Bay like they used to, but you don’t have to go very far to have fun. We still have great boating around here.
“The Canadian market has been very good for us. The Canadian dollar is at par, and they’ve been used to high fuel prices for a long time. Everybody in the world has been used to high gas prices but us.”
Owners of small fishing boats, 20 feet and shorter, also seem to be taking increased fuel prices in stride, mostly because they don’t go far and their smaller engines don’t use as much fuel.
“I don’t like the idea of $5-a-gallon gas, but I’m not going to stop fishing,” said Jim Burchill, who trailers his 19-foot Lund and 150-horsepower outboard engine from his home in Brighton to lakes around Michigan. “If gas goes up another dollar, it will mean an extra $15, $20 a trip. I can handle that. And most of the time I fish with a buddy who splits the cost of the gas. The people I feel sorry for are the ones who have that 25-, 30-footer that uses as much gas in an hour as I’ll use all day.”
One of those people is Milton Walker of Monroe, Mich., owner of an 8-year-old, 26-foot Sea Ray that he keeps at a marina on Lake Erie.
“When I bought this boat, gas was about $1.75 a gallon,” Walker said. “Now I’m being told I’ll have to pay three times that much at a marina this summer? No way I can afford that, at least not using the boat like we used to.
“But we’ll still go boating. We’ll use it more like a camper or summer cottage, maybe go find a nice place to anchor for the weekend and just sit in one place.”
Jim O’Keefe, from the northern Michigan town of Dublin, is at the other end of the fuel-use scale from Pittiglio, getting about 8 miles per gallon in his 18-foot Panga powered by a 40-horsepower outboard.
The boat’s beam is 6 feet, compared with 7½-8 ½ feet for most boats that length, and its 950 pounds is about half that of most 18-footers. The result is low gas consumption.
“This is a design that was developed by commercial fishermen who have to go out in big seas and can’t afford big engines,” O’Keefe said. “It’s really stable, and most of the time if I’m only going out for three, four hours I won’t even use 6 gallons of gas.
“The top speed with a 40 [horsepower] is a little over 30 miles an hour. It’s not real fast, but I don’t go far.”