View Single Post
Old 10-17-2011, 03:45 PM   #5
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
COMPLETELY NEW AT THIS - Please help me with my education

You can do what many of us did, which is buy a small boat, a trailer boat, take a boating course from the USCG Auxiliary or the US Power Squadron, and start boating.* Make all your first mistakes on a smaller, much less expensive boat and then when you've gotten a pretty good handle on this "boating thing,"buy a larger boat if you find you want one.

If you want to jump right into cruising boats of the type most of us on TF have, probably the smartest way is to charter one for a few years.* It's doubtful whether a charter company will rent a boat to someone with no experience, but you might be able to split a boat with a friend who has sufficient experience, or charter a captained boat the first few times.

If you are determined to purchase a cruising boat right off the bat and simply have at it, there are a few reasons why this is okay and about a zillion why it isn't.* All I will say at this point is that you will face a VERY steep learning curve with multiple opportunities to make fairly major mistakes, some of which will cost you huge amounts of money.

Our story is similar to many people's on this forum.* My initial power boating experience was in the later 1970s on a friend's 28' Uniflite fishing boat in Hawaii were I grew up.* I rarely drove the boat and our navigation was totally visual, but out in the open Pacific I learned a fair amount about the boating environment.* I also did some crewing on co-workers' sailboats interisland.

Later, in the early 80s after moving to the Seattle area my girlfriend/later wife started with a used 12' Sears aluminum skiff and a 6hp outboard.* Carried it in the back of a Ford F250 Supercab pickup and used it for fishing on lakes up in BC.* Then in 1987 we bought a new 17' Arima which we towed behind the pickup and used for salmon and halibut fishing on Puget Sound and in BC.* We still own and use this boat (see photo).* My wife and I took the USCG Auxiliary course immediatly after buying the boat which is something I highly recommend taking.* But with the Arima we learned a lot about navigation (Loran-C) and added a whole bunch to our "boating common sense" files.

During all this time we were flying floatplanes in the Puget Sound area and up the Inside Passage in BC to SE Alaska.* Not the same as boating per se, but we got REAL familiar with the whole region.

After looking down on all these fabulous bodies of water from the plane, we*thought it would be great to have*a boat that we could someday cruise and explore the area with, but before we took the plunge we followed a good friend's advice and chartered a 36' Grand Banks to see if we really liked this kind of boating.* We did, so in 1998 we acquired our own*(old) Grand Banks.

So, an evoutionary process rather than a revolutionary one.* I personally feel it is the smartest, safest, and most enjoyable way to approach the whole thing, but others will have other opinions.

PS-- Chapman's is a good reference book--- and there are many others--- but I myself would not recommend you start with it.* Way too much information, much of which won't make much sense to you until you already have a basic grasp of what boats are all about.* So I personally would not bother with Chapmans at this point but either take the USCG Auxilliary or Power Squadron course or charter a boat.* Best of*all at this point, I think,*is to start going out with friends who have boats (if you have friends who have boats).

*



*


-- Edited by Marin on Monday 17th of October 2011 05:40:25 PM
Attached Thumbnails
telegraph1.jpg  
Marin is offline   Reply With Quote