Boats isn’t making many waves with its announcement that it’s ending a 15 year long career.

The announcement came with a Facebook event called Probably The Last Boats Show, which is happening on March 4.

“It’s probably the last show,” Mat Klachefsky, Boats guitarist and vocalist, says.

Klachefsky recently got a new job that will take him out of the city for four months of the year.

“Before I got this new job, Boats was my number one concern. Now it’s probably about number four,” Klachefsky says.

He doesn’t want to eat up the other band members’ creative time with something that he’s not putting all of himself into.

“When Mat came up with this idea, it kind of made sense to all of us,” Rory Ellis, who plays guitar and “other stuff” for Boats, says. 

He says Boats was the first good band that he was in and that’s led to other musical opportunities for him, which he will be putting more of a focus on, after the last Boats show.

“This was the right time to kind of bookend it,” Ellis says.

Klachefsky says they’ve accomplished a lot of things that most bands don’t get the chance to do.

The Winnipeg band’s first album, Intercontinental Champion came out in 2007 and since they’ve released two more, Cannonballs, Cannonballs and A Fairway Full of Miners.

“It’s a brutal industry. Just failure at every turn,” Klachefsky says. “So we’re going to take our accomplishments and run with them.”

Boats has gone on tour in Europe and Klachefsky says there are few major cities in North America that they haven’t played in.

A highlight for Ian Ellis, Boats drummer, was going to the waterslides in Edmonton, Alta. They also got to do an artists’ residency at the Banff Centre.

“We went to Wizard Quest (in Wisconsin Dells) once,” Klachefsky says. “That was a career highlight.”

Rory Ellis says there have been some murmuring of people who are sad to see the band move on.

“Weird nerds are sad,” Klachefsky says. 

Boats bass player Louis Levesque-Cote says no one seems to really care that they’re packing it in, other than the band members, because so many bands break up but still play reunion shows. 

And that’s sort of what the Boats members will be doing.

“We’re actually going to probably keep playing music together,” Klachefsky says. They’re going to change the name they’re playing under and joke that the music won’t be good.

“This is going to be our last good show worth going to,” Klachefsky says.

Human Music and Beefdonut will be opening for possibly, probably the last Boats show.

Published in Volume 70, Number 22 of The Uniter (March 3, 2016)