The Italian website Giornale Della Vela carried out a kind of nautical survey, counting the number of sport and pleasure vessels in international waters. Result: it is estimated that there are 33 million boats in the world (only 8% of them are sailboats), and almost half are concentrated in the United States, which has a fleet of almost 16 million units (rate of 48 boats per 1000 inhabitants ).

But Americans are not the ones who like to sail the most. In this regard (rate of one boat per 1000 inhabitants), Canadians occupy the top of the ranking, with an average of 234 units; the country has 8.6 million boats and 36.7 million inhabitants.

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Finland, Norway and Sweden range between 75 and 210 boats per 1000 inhabitants. New Zealand has 153. Australia has 40.6. Among the Mediterranean countries, Croatia (with 25 boats per 1000 inhabitants) and Greece (17 boats) enter the top 10. Italy is among the countries with the highest number of registered leisure boats, 577,513, but in the proportion number of boats per 1000 inhabitants is only 9.
According to data from the 5th NÁUTICA International Congress, held at the São Paulo Boat Show 2019, Brazil has around 700,000 leisure boats and a population of close to 210 million people (according to IBGE data), which means that we have 3.3 boats per 1000 inhabitants.
In last place in the ranking is China, with only 116,475 boats for a population of almost 1.4 billion inhabitants, which gives an average of 0.08 per 1000. The data were collected with the International Council of Marine Industry Associations ( ICOMIA), the world association of the nautical industry.