If there’s one thing learned during this past year, it’s that people’s appetites for outdoor recreation has gone crazy.

Outdoor products have flown out of shops and manufacturers can’t keep up.

Another thing to add to the list of what’s hard to buy is boats, report East Idaho boat sellers and manufacturers.

“Everything has been depleted. Dealers’ stock has been depleted, the manufacturers’ stock has been depleted. There’s nothing left in the pipeline,” said Greg Gillespie, owner of Precision Boats in Idaho Falls. “The consumers literally sucked the pipeline dry. … They’ve gone absolutely crazy over recreation.”

A recent New York Times story reported that nationwide, sales of boats under 50 feet are up 27 percent from 2019 and 35 percent over 2020.

Gillespie, and other boat sellers in Idaho Falls, said getting a recreational boat is several months out. Some specific types of boats or brands are already sold out through 2022.

“About the soonest we could have somebody a boat is like January,” said Matt Kelley, of ClackaCraft, who sells drift boats across the country and primarily in the Intermountain West. “But we have a whole bunch of orders for March. For the most part, we’re looking at spring orders right now.”

Kelley said normally this time of year they have stock boats available for immediate purchase, but not this year.

“We’re just very busy and very back-ordered,” he said.

Kelley attributes the shortage to demand.

“We’re seeing regions in the U.S. that we normally sell a handful of boats into, some of those regions are heating up,” he said. “Our normal places that we sell boats have more and more demand. A lot of people are buying houses and moving into the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West and wanting to buy a boat and recreate on the rivers.”

Hyde Drift Boats, a company that makes and sells drift boats and trailers in Idaho Falls, is feeling the pinch in two directions: Difficulty in acquiring needed materials to build boats and keeping up with the unusual demand from buyers.

“I’ve been in business for over 50 years and it’s the craziest I’ve ever seen,” said LaMoyne Hyde, owner and president of Hyde Drift Boats. “It’s a whole new ballgame for sure. … When a person comes in and wants to buy a boat and I tell them three months, you and I both know that the fishing season isn’t much good in three months. They’re buying them for next year right now.”

Hyde Drift Boats manufactures fiberglass boats and trailers and finds that some components have been hard to come by since the pandemic struck.

“The nice thing is that we build our own boats. We can control what it is as long as the supply chain will take care of us,” Hyde said. “We have over 500 vendors that supply us. That’s a lot of stuff to have it go (wrong) for sure. I just got a couple hundred tires in that we ordered back in February. Normally it would come every week.”

Kelley said his operation has had to be a bit stingy with certain items more in demand during the past year.

“We’ve been on the knife’s edge with some materials so far,” Kelley said. “We had a pretty good surplus going into this, so we’ve been OK there. Some of our components that we purchase from manufacturers, parts and pieces, things like that, we’ve had a hard time keeping those things. … Normally somebody could just come in and buy a pair of oars. Instead, we’ve had to hang on to them for our boat sales.”

Boat-makers and sellers are expecting the high demand to continue at least for the next several months. One contributing factor is that the industry’s capacity to build boats is limited.

Gillespie said selling out all of his product hasn’t changed his business’ bottom line much. He said most years he typically sells more than 100 boats.

“As far as the sales end of it, it’s realistically just a normal year,” Gillespie said. “The normal year takes all year to do, and we’ve been doing it in the first five months of the year. By the time May rolls around we are pretty much sold out of everything.”

One area he has noticed a hit to his business is the current lack of used boats. As the demand for new boats increases, used boat demand also rises and private parties find it easy to resell, opting out of trade-ins at stores such as Gillespie’s.

“I looked back this week and our revenue on used boats is about 25% of what it was,” Gillespie said. “We’ve lost 75% of our used boat sales over the last four years. I think that people are selling their boats for more money than they are worth. That’s not something that we would do as a business.”