GORDON BUTLER

Boating.

Some of us have wonderful memories of it; others will have either heart-gripping fear or the blind enthusiasm of the uninitiated neophyte:

“We can’t entertain the thought of getting a boat!”

Then there’s the best spousal objection, and the one that’ll virtually close out the argument:

(Plaintively) “I’m not going out in the Ocean in that!”

Meanwhile, you’re reliving those halcyon summers when you used to take the family runabout waterskiing or heading out with your buddies to parts unknown, exploring the islands or other places, like beaches where you couldn’t see anybody. You learned that on the water there are no roads, and you were limited in those explorations to the fuel you had and the pennies in your pocket, and your mother’s call at dinnertime.

So, you go back to the boating magazines and pore over those incredible pictures. And the thoughts keep coming:

“Well, I have to go with something that’ll accommodate both the kids, and it’s got to be big enough to go to the Bahamas, so it’ll have to have that kind of range, and it has to have enough room for everybody to sleep in it, so we need toilet facilities, then it has to have something where we can have dinner or feed the whole bunch of them … “

Then there’s the BIG question.

Sail or power.

Let me see …

“Well, if I get a sailboat, I definitely don’t have to worry about fuel, but if I get a powerboat, I don’t have to worry about being caught in a dead calm, and with the wind if I take it straight out to somewhere, I won’t have to zig-zag back.”

Next question is, “Should it be new or used?”

This is the first of what we expect will be a series of columns about boating. It’ll cover sail and power, fishing and cruising. And if you’re doing what many people do in the winter boat shows, you’re doing what the harried husband is doing in the spaces above. You’re convincing your wife that the family needs a boat, and it’s going to be safe, you can take the kids, she’ll be able to sleep just like she does at home, and you and she can feed yourselves and your kids with a galley that provides cooking and hot water, and toilet and shower facilities … and you’d better know how to get to the Bahamas if you’re going to go there. There’s tide, running inlets and, “How the heck do I even get there? When we took that cruise from Port Canaveral, we got on board, had dinner, went to sleep and when we woke up the next morning, we were coming in to Nassau! How difficult could that be?”

The next step to be taken by the budding neophyte captain is the following: Take a course.

Two great organizations give courses for budding boaters. The United States Coast Guard Auxiliary offers excellent courses, and the United States Power Squadrons offer courses that range from Basic Seamanship to Navigation (and you have to buy course materials when you sign up – but the materials are offered at cost). If you like, we can talk about the courses in following columns, but you get the gist of this. Every year, you hear about boating accidents: someone going too fast in a crowded waterway, someone going out with not enough fuel, someone caught in a perfect storm and no knowledge.

Take the course, from either one of those fine organizations. You might even end up being a permanent member of one of them. Excellent group of people; can’t recommend them highly enough.

So now that you’ve taken the course and bought the boat, now what will you do? You can set your own pace in your familiarization process. Start out by spending a day running up to Pelican Island, the country’s first national wildlife center and see the wonders of nature. If that’s too tame, try a weekend trip up the Intracoastal Waterway to Captain Hiram’s in Grant, where they have a wonderful restaurant, marina, fuel and dinner, and for a modest fee, you can plug in to power and water. After an early dinner, you can take the boat back out into the Intracoastal and hang out near one of those pretty islands by dropping the anchor and falling asleep as you see the millions of stars. That in itself is a trip!

Well, get some miles under the bottom of that boat before you go to the Bahamas!

There are marinas aplenty throughout the Space and Treasure Coasts, and you can live it up if you go to one of the boating centers of the world down in Fort Lauderdale.

There’s no end to the kinds of things you can do and see. From right here in Vero Beach, and with that little 38-footer you’ve just bought, you can take your wife and kids on the same Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway that goes up the middle of Vero Beach right here in town, to New York City and up the Hudson River, around to Albany, through the Great Lakes and around to Chicago and down the Mississippi River where you can come out into the Gulf of Mexico at either New Orleans or Mobile, Alabama.

We’ll be here in forthcoming issues of Inside Vero to talk about boating, passagemaking, fishing, cruising, visiting places on the water, cooking on board, boat maintenance, anchoring, tying up and some basic knots, how to be a captain, how to be a first mate, how to run an inlet, and anything that might relate or pertain to having fun on the water. We can even answer questions if you send us an e-mail at gordon.insidevero@gmail.com.

Y’r obe’t s’rv’t lived aboard a medium size power boat for twenty-eight years. I was an officer in the Banana River Power Squadron and I’ve been all over the Intracoastal Waterway (but never did the trip from the Great Lakes to Mobile via the Mississippi). If you’ve done it, I’d love to hear from you. You can tell me and our readers about your trip, and whether you’d ever do it again.

In the meantime, I’ll see you on the water.