Your first time on a boat

Wifey B: Not first boat you owned, but first time on a boat.

My first time, I was 13 and I snuck out without permission (well, I forged parent approval but then I often did that), and went with a church group, although I didn't attend the church. We went to a lake about an hour away. It seemed like a lifetime away. There were all these boats going by and we even got out on a big pontoon boat for a little while. That was like a dream, so far away from my life. All the boats, nice homes on the water, it was a world I knew I was only visiting and would never be part of, but for that afternoon, it was worth any punishment coming from it. There turned out to be none because when I got home my father was drunk and it was easy to tell him, I'd been at a friends and told him before I left and he had said ok. I didn't even allow myself to dream of actually owning a boat. I just relived that afternoon over and over in my mind.

Imagine what a bayliner (w/ a 4 barrel carb 454) bought in the mid 90's from a junkyard for $500 looked like. That was the first boat I was ever on other than a ferry. All summer long my boss and I we'd drive up to the boat after work. Take the battery out of the work van bring it onboard and use it and a can of starter fluid to start the boat. We'd fish/drink all night, come back to the dock, put the battery back in the van and drive away. Nap, shower, work and repeat.

Imagine my surprise when the boat sank at the dock one night. The crap we'd get away with back then was great.

No Mast said:

Imagine my surprise when the boat sank at the dock one night. The crap we'd get away with back then was great.

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Wifey B: Did you get it up and going again?

My father and grandfather took me shopping with them to a Sears store. I was 5-years old. They looked away for a minute and I took off. After a frantic search they found me in the sporting goods department sitting in an aluminum row boat. Despite my pleas they refused to buy it for me. That was the first boat I was ever on.

I was 8 months old when my parents rented a house on Penobscot Bay (that they later bought). The only access to it at the time was by boat and my parents' friends delivered us to it aboard their 40' +/- schooner.

The story goes that the landlady rowed out to meet us in a dory but the skipper didn't see her and rolled her under with the forefoot. My father fished her out with her spluttering that she had had the right of way.

I obviously remember every detail.

BandB said:

Wifey B: Did you get it up and going again?

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Oh no, my boss gave some guy a few bucks to tow it out of the marina and let it finish sinking that same night. Different times, different world.

7 years old, I think, fishing a small water shed lake in Oklahoma. My uncle had a 16 foot aluminum john boat with a sears tiller steered engine. We had tent camped for the week. I remember every minute of it. We would check the trotline every morning and evening, rebaiting with chicken gizzards. Even caught some catfish. He also had bird dogs and shotguns and deer rifles and a old 4wd scout. He was my hero.

Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland? Otherwise, a row boat in Santa Monica bay when 7 fishing.

I got a 9' wooden row boat on Lake Huron when I was about 5. Grampa bought it for me and he bought a 7.5hp Evinrude for it when I was 7. I was in hog heaven and spent many, many hours on that boat.


That was the start of my bad habit which has lasted some 65 years.

First I remember was when I was about 5 yrs old on Jobos Bay on the South Coast of Puerto Rico where I grew up. My Dad built a 14 plywood kit boat, with a 7.5 hp Evinrude it flew, well, it felt like it back then. The bay had lots of good fishing; Snapper, Snook, Spanish & King Mackerel, even some Tarpon. Lots of good times on it.

I must have been four or five because my parents were still married. My father, Uncle Bob, Uncle Rick, and my grandfather took me with them for an overnight camping trip on Lake Zoar above Stevenson Dam in Oxford, Connecticut. The boat was aluminum, outboard motor in a brown housing, they all wore red plaid hunting coats. I sat next to the ice cooler between the seats. My grandmother packed us loaded baked potatoes in foil, but we got hot dogs at the Lake Zoar drive in before we launched too (although back then it was just the Lake Zoar food stand, wasn't called the drive in until high school). As I remember it was a long, long run on the water to the woods where we camped, but the whole lake is only about ten miles long. We got there so late most of the boat run was at night, very dark. Now that was exciting. Slept in a pretty smelly green canvas tent. Dad had to lift me in and out of the boat.

Interesting how so many of us remember those moments so vividly. Funny though, my father doesn't remember that boating/camping trip at all.

I don't remember my first time at all. Both my father and uncle had aluminum fishing boats as they argued over motors. They both had 9 hp or 9.9 or whatever was in that range. Uncle had Mercury, father had Evinrude. Like most of my childhood, I don't have specific or detailed memories. Don't remember ever actually being on either of those boats, just know I was.

First time on a boat was on a rented wooden rowboat on Clear Lake, CA, perhaps 12 or 14 feet long, and wide enough my brother and I could row abreast of each other. No PFDs of course. No nanny state then. We were expendable.

A rental row boat with my father and older brother off of Miller's Island Road near Pleasure Island in Maryland. The rental company was Hartmann's and I was very small. Went fishing, and I was surprised how many other boats were there when it became light. Maybe 1965.

First time on a boat? Well, that would have been in early June of 1947, when my mother brought me home from the hospital to the sail boat they were living on in St. Petersburg, FL. Then mom got home sick, made dad sell the boat, and we drove back to Washington state where they were from. No place to live, so we stayed on my grandparents boat while dad built a house for us. A few years later dad built us a boat that we lived on during the summer months, cruising the San Juan's and BC. So when people ask me about my thing with boats, I just tell them it's not my fault!!

First time on a boat?
Well, if I cheat, it was days before I was born.
Mom had a difficult delivery with my brother so, rather than let the camp first aide/cook/flunky/barber bring me out in a bunkhouse, it was decided I would arrive in style. So off on the Union boat for a trip to St. Vincent's in Vancouver.

Ok, so I guess the first real life boat ride was a couple weeks later going back to camp. Maybe 10 days old. After that, I was on anything that floated.

Boats were our life. I don't have memories prior to about 4 but know there would have been many trips in those early days. A lot of the camp boys had boats at one time or another but most were used to try to move rocks.

I have lots of memories, sitting on the back deck of fish boats, making the frequent short grocery and liquor runs to Alert Bay or Sointula from Englewood (now Beaver Cove).

The most vivid memories are from 4 on...

There was a bustling sawmill in Telegraph Cove that had a big seine boat named Hillicum (spelling?). She had no fish gear, but a big hold and was rigged to haul lumber on deck or tow scows around the immediate area and up to Port Hardy. Many rides on that one, just to get us kids away from camp and give moms a break. I recall a trip up to Namu, (Old) Bella Bella and Klemtu. Slept and ate aboard. Kids paradise.

There were 2 bootlegging brothers in Alert Bay who eventually bought a pair of brand new Chris Crafts that had seats like a bus. Sat maybe 20. First real water taxis at Alert Bay.

Other names I remember were Gikamee and a big fast lapstrake, maybe Clinker, named Phantom Lady that ran from Alert Bay in all directions but mostly to Kelsey Bay when weather allowed.

I could go on...

With my parents in a rented 14 ft wooden boat with a 5 hp Johnson on Diablo Lake in Washington State.

Too young to remember. Best bet is that my first boat ride was while I was still an infant in the early 60s, on either a wooden kit runabout built by my father or a rowboat built by my grandfather, on St. George's Creek in Southern Maryland.

I have an old home movie of my mother tearing around on the runabout, with the steering wheel in one hand and an infant in the other (I forgot which one of us). Neither she or the infant are wearing a life vest. My father was on the foredeck, facing aft with the camera to get the shot.

It would be a raft my brothers & I built out of logs and driftwood, tied together with a bit of rope. We launched it on the Goat river in BC when I was about 8 or 9. It broke up when we hit a bit of whitewater, and I lost my glasses in the ensuing chaos.

The following summer, I saved up my cherry picking money and bought a proper 6 foot vinyl dinghy from the Sears catalog. We shot the rapids in style then.

Camp Sea Gull on the Neuse River in 1974.

(assuming the log flume at Carowinds or the little boat ride at Pullen Park that just went in a circle don't count... I think I was 3... I have the film)

Ya know, I'm sittin' here waiting for MurrayM to pop up to tell us about his first time on a boat and maybe who she was...

Conception, in the Dismal Swamp canal. It was very cold.

Birth: Forward cabin, starboard side bunk. I've always been right.

Tom B-my brother was a counselor at Camp Seagull during the summers of '71-'73!

Don't remember infancy boating, but I'm guessing I was around 8-10 or so when first driving the jon boat when we ran the trot lines for catfish, about 4x/day in "high" season.


-Chris

First time on a boat was inside mom on the Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard Massachusetts ferry. Repeated the trip at 10 months and each year after for the next 25 years.

Apparently I pestered my parents enough at age 3 for them to let me go on their friends 30' sailboat. Vividly remember going sailing on that windy day and wondering why he couldn't keep the deck level. Guess they thought that would make me a land lover like them. Didn't quite work out that way.

Ted

Does poling yourself around the big (well it seemed big back then) farm dam in a 3' x 4' packing case count as boating..?

OC Diver; said:

I pestered my parents enough at age 3 for them to let me go on theirfriends 30' sailboat. Vividly remember going sailing on that windy day andwondering why he couldn't keep the deck level.

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I think it's cool that several here were pretty much born in the salt chuck.

The vividness of those early memories, while not necessarily accurate, are vivid none the less. I can still look waaaay up to the bow of that seine boat, Hillicum. She might have only been 50-60 feet, I don't know, but size to a 5 year old...so grand.

I am sure that my earliest memories are not near the first times. I recall riding on my Dad's shoulders as we forded a stream on our hunt for the elusive Dolly Varden, and at about the same age, so pretty young, rowing along singing fishing songs while towing a gang troll in Loon Lake (Haney BC). Good memories, Dad never could sing. Rental boats gave way to homebuilt, so the memories develop a more accurate timeline.

I was the baby of the family. My mom and dad bought a boat when I was about five...and they named it after me. The "John-O". That is what they called me. SO my first boat ride was on a boat named after me...at the age of 5. I was doomed from the get go...I stood no chance. Boats would be forever a part of my life!!!!

Wifey B: Wow...this is so cool So many of you in olden days, in some form of boat related to commercial fishing or logging or other things, in small boats, just so interesting to hear. Different worlds. Might be interesting if you think of your children and grandchildren and their first times and how it changed generation to generation.

I did a quick survey of those around us and close to us that we know the answer for. 60 year old male Captain-on his father's charter fishing boat off Hatteras. For his granddaughter who is 20, her first was his charter boat.

50 year old female, born in Spain, grew up in far different world from the rest of us-the boat was Christina. Easy for her to remember since that's her name. She was only 3 or 4. Actually the tender to get to Christina. She thought it was named after her and was so disappointed when she found out it was named after Onassis' daughter. However, Christina Onassis was very nice to her and told her all Christina's had to stick together. She met, basically just shook hands, Jackie, but had no idea the significance of who she was, was just confused that Christina was Onassis' daughter and Jackie his wife, but Jackie wasn't her mother.

32 year old female, daughter of the above Christina-she thinks she was about 2, the first time, the tour boat that does day cruises around NYC. She made her parents take her back over and over. Then went to her grandparents' in Spain and went out on a yacht, she can't remember anything else about. However, last time she was in NY, she and her mom took the tour boat around the city.

32 year old friend from FL, it was a GB from Chitwood. Then her father bought a GB and has owned one since.

29 year old female. It was our boat here. 28 year old female, it was our boat on the lake in NC. 20 year old female, she asked at maritime school what jobs on boats were like and they arranged for her to go out on their training boat for a day.

41 year old and 27 year old females. With both it was small fishing boats with their parents on small country ponds in NC. Just jogged Hubby's memory and now he says that may have been his first too, instead of the lake.

Then sadly, two of our closest friends, more like grandparents to us even if nowhere near old enough. 61 and 58 years old, moved with us from NC. He wasn't allowed near the water since he didn't know how to swim. There's the obvious point of how are you going to learn. Her first time was when she was young and it was a church camp with canoes and there was a tragedy. Neither of them ever got on a boat again and still worry about us every time we do. They won't get in a pool either.

Then back to positive. Our niece. Omg I love her. Granddaughter of the parents we adopted as ours just over 15 years ago and daughter of the sister we adopted as ours. She's been on for a couple of hours, short trips, watched very close. But on her 3rd birthday, we're going to take her out for a longer trip and let her spend the night the first time on a boat. Then she'll spend regular time on the water with her Auntie and Uncle. She's half way to that birthday now.

I thank you all so much for sharing your stories.