BIG BEAR LAKE — Mike Meyer and Ronnie Russell prefer to vacation far from their Newport Beach home, but a recent excursion found them plying the placid blue waters of Big Bear Lake aboard a faux pirate ship.
The couple own a condo in this mountain community, and this is where they now spend a lot of their down time.
"We usually go to Mexico or exotic places like that," Ronnie Russell said from her perch on the ship's deck. "But with the economy and everything, we aren't doing that as much."
Their lake voyage meant two $19 fares for the company that owns the replica of the 16th century Spanish galleon. But in general the "second-home" crowd doesn't spend as much money as true out-of-towners do, local merchants say, and that's putting a dent in their business.
"We see a lot of homeowners use their own cabins," said Tina McCrudden, director of property management at Big Bear Cool Cabins, which rents out homes in the area. "They do their own repairs and they don't eat out."
They apparently don't buy souvenirs as much, either.
"This spring has been a lot slower than previous years," said Michael Romero, who owns a wholesale souvenir and T-shirt business that supplies about 50 shops in the Big Bear Lake area.
He estimates that sales have dropped between 30% and 40% in the last few months. He's not panicking yet.
"Business has been down, but I'm hoping for a good summer," he said.
Unlike many other Southland resort destinations, Big Bear has long relied on a mix of both vacation-home owners who make regular visits and others who come up much less frequently and rent their lodgings.
Because of the economic downturn, however, fewer people are willing or able to rent cabins. As a result, a cabin that rented last year for $750 a week goes for about $450 now, said McCrudden.
What's more, she said, some cabin owners who used to rent out their places are no longer doing so because they don't make as much -- opting instead to stay in the cabins themselves.
How much that trend has hurt local merchants is anyone's guess, but there's no denying that sales are down. For the last three months of 2008, sales tax receipts were down 7.4% from the year-earlier period, according to the most recent city records available.
All of this comes on top of a slow ski season, during which visits to two local resorts -- Bear Mountain and Snow Summit -- dropped about 8% compared with last year's season, despite a winter with some of the best snowfall in a decade.
