Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Annals of Tourism Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/annals When sea becomes home Neva Lepoša School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Box 700, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden ARTICLE INFO Associate Editor: Kevin Hannam Keywords: Home Away Practices Affordances Leisure boating Sea ABSTRACT This paper speaks to the home/away debate in tourism research through a case study of leisure boating. Practice theory and affordance theory, participant observation and interviews with boaters touring or departing from Bohuslän, Sweden are used to illustrate how changes in ma- terial affordances and material setup co-transform practices and meanings. Through the in- troduction of house-like facilities, powered by the boat’s engines and employing home skills, some boats afford a family/single person a more comfortable and independent “stay at home” on the sea than in the past, while boating resembling camping is becoming an ex-practice. However, boats continue to afford mobility, for which boating skills are required. This paper thus chal- lenges the theoretical opposition in tourism studies between home and away. Introduction Leisure boating has witnessed a general increase in the number, size and engine power of boats (SwedishTransportAgency, 2016; InterConnection, 2006; Laaksonen, 2012). In Scandinavia, boating is a popular leisure activity, and the Bohuslän coast in Sweden is an area frequently visited by leisure boaters (Riskföreningen, 2010). A study of visitors to Bohuslän in boats reports a trend towards buying or wishing for larger and/or better-equipped boats and a correlation between boat size and number of nights spent on board (Leposa, 2017). As a corollary of this trend, I found that leisure boaters refer to their boats as ‘summer homes’ and talk about ‘getting away’, as exemplified below: Today, people have enough money to buy a boat to live in, and it’s so expensive to buy a summer house. If you want to buy a summer house by the coast, it’s crazy. So a lot of people buy a boat instead. So a boat is a summer house and people don’t care so much about sailing. I like to get away from the normal life back home and be out in the open, at sea and on the islands, to experience new places and relax. I guess, [it is] also the combination of sun, water and water sports, bathing, and all that is very different from the things we do when the kids are at school and we are working. Family leisure boating became popular in Sweden in the 1940s and was typically done on a 25 foot long ‘people’s boat’ (Sjöhistoriska, 2018). Today this type of boating is done in larger boats, as a boater visiting Bohuslän on a 30 foot boat explains: “When we bought this boat 35 years ago, this was a big boat but nowadays it’s a very small boat compare to the others.” In the context of the trend for boats to become not only larger but also better equipped, this paper explores the material affordances and practices associated with the two aspects of boating: as a summer house on the one hand and a means to ‘get away’ on the other. These two aspects appear dissonant in relation to home/away debate in tourism studies, where tourism is traditionally conceptualized as an away and not a home activity. Boating and the sea are strongly linked with boaters’ identities and sense of belonging. Jalas (2006) shows how boaters create https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.06.001 Received 8 September 2017; Received in revised form 1 June 2018; Accepted 4 June 2018 E-mail address: neva.leposa@globalstudies.gu.se. Annals of Tourism Research 72 (2018) 11–21 Available online 09 June 2018 0160-7383/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T