Miami
IBEX 2009
I did IBEX this year and once again I'm glad I did. The
floor area was about a quarter the size that it was in 2006
almost everybody there was industry. It did make for a slower
paced and friendlier IBEX.
The big deal for me was the evening event for the Gougeon
Bros. Meade had called much earlier after reading my article
Post-Apocalyptic Boatbuilding. He was planning
to retire, but he toldme that the article got him thinking
about diving back into wood-as-an-engineering-material end
of it. How cool is that?
An aside, he drove all over the country this summer 2009
in a motor home, visiting various wooden boat shows, along
with Jim Brown and Dick Newick at various times. Wouldn't
that have been a great Ken Burns film?
New products
I did not see many new products that startled me with their
ingenuity. The coolest were all the new LED lights and crazy
clever switches.
