I learned to drive a car and bought a some from Austin Healey to Aston Martin to Land and Range Rovers to Ford pickup to BMW, learned to fly a plane and bought one, learned to boat and bought two, all without the aid of Al Gore's internet (it existed for some of that but it was pretty rude and crude compared its current state so played no role in my/our education or purchase decisions).
The same can probably be said of most of the more experienced boaters on this forum. And most of us probably made pretty good decisions.
Absolutely nothing has changed since then. Curiosity, common sense, logic, skeptisim, being a good judge of character and quality, and educating one's self are still the main tools for getting into any activity like boating and cruising.
But... what is changing I think is people's willingness to-- and even knowledge of how to-- use and apply those attributes. More and more, people want to have solutions handed to them on the internet.
The internet is a great research and education tool but it is no substitute for the other attributes I listed. But what's going to happen is that more and more people are going to ask the same old question: "I want to buy a cruising boat but I don't know anything about them and I want to buy a good one I can live on and cruise the Great Loop/Inside Passage/Carribean and my budget is $20,000 to $50,000. What should I get?"
How many times is one willing to give the same, very complex answer? Few to no people are willing to search a forum archives; they want an immediate new answer.
I used to try to answer these folks. I don't anymore, or at best I might offer an observation on a single point. So far as I'm concerned, they can do what I did and figure it out on their own, using all the tools I mentioned earlier. The internet is certainly one of these tools. But advice from people I don't know, can't see, can't talk directly to, and have no way of judging if they actually know what they're talking about is advice I will not act on.
We have had hundreds of issues come up with our boats over the years, some of them fairly serious. With the exception of the Grand Banks forum which has a couple of shipwrights and a former yard owner I happen to know, we have never asked an "I've got such and such a problem" question of a boating forum. Because we've long since learned that every question, no matter how simple, generates multiple answers and opinions.
We've found it is much, much faster to pick up the phone or send an e-mail to the people we have learned ourselves to be experts. Or if we don't already know who they are, we know how to find them. Most of them are professionals: electronics, diesel, electrical, fuel, woodworking, fiberglass, etc.
We just decided to have new seat and seat back cushions made for the main cabin in our PNW boat. So we started asking people we know who have had this kind of work done within the past few years who they used. We looked at upholstery on boats that had just had it redone and compared the work of different shops in the area. My wife asked members of the sewing club she's in for upholsterer recommendations.
And we were led to an amazing upholstery expert in Yakima, across the mountains from western Washington, who has won national awards for his custom car work. People trailer their bazillion-dollar custom cars from all over the country to have him do the upholstery. Some of these people own boats and after they see the kind of job he does on their cars they bring their trailer boats to him, or in the cases of big boats/yachts, have flown him to the vessel to make his patterns.
And the added bonus is that this fellow's prices are well below the "marine" upholstery shops in the Puget Sound area. But... we still had to check him out. So on Saturday we took our cushions and drove three hours east across the mountains to meet him and see his work.
A couple of hours with him in his shop confirmed what we'd been told.
In my opinion, that's what it takes to get a good result regardless of the quest: car, truck, plane, boat, or refrigerator. We bought a new set of binoculars yesterday. I'd gotten on the internet and done an extensive search, read reviews and comments on hunting forums and the like, and settled on a pair that would meet our needs.
Thank God I didn't order them. We decided to go to Cabela's to check them out in person as they carry that make and model and one of the stores had them in stock. Got there, checked them out, and they were very disappointing compared to other makes and models in the same price range suggested by the store's optics guy.
Bottom line for us is forums are fun and they are one source for ideas but they are no substitute for thinking smart and doing the legwork yourself.
