Sometimes people say, “Well it is just a car on water, and I can drive a car so I can drive a boat.”
No. Just plain no, that is not true. A boat and a car are incredibly different. When I was younger, I didn’t think the differences were all that obvious, but they definitely are present. If you take a moment to analyze each difference, it will reveal how they are not so similar at all. Overall, a boat essentially has two parts to control: something to steer (a steering wheel) and something to give it gas (a throttle arm).
We see something is missing that a car has: a brake pedal! Nope, no brakes on a boat. I cannot emphasize how much that will affect your driving. Imagine if no cars had breaks, that’s what it’s like on the bay! That can seem terrifying (which it is frankly) but the boats move in a medium (water) that has a lot of friction. This causes the boat to drag and loose momentum. Therefore, the boat naturally wants to rest when giving it no throttle. This is only for a certain extent. Depending on your speed and the current of the water, it can completely change how fast you will slow down when letting off the throttle.
The throttle mechanism is also different from a car. People will say, “Oh the gas pedal is just something you move in your hands now.” While physically a car and boat engine appear to look similar, many features are different. Speed boats are constantly breaking and expensive to fix versus a car’s engine because of the type of work they do. If you think about it the boat is constantly facing overcoming that strong friction in the water. It must divert all the water and to do that the propellor must be spinning at a constantly applied rpm. The engine is constantly revving at thousands of rpm when throttling to apply force, versus when you drive a car you only normally give an amount of gas on the pedal and can back off. So in a boat, the throttle arm has resistance for when you want to leave it at a certain rpm, rather than a pedal that has no resistance and was to return back to its home position.
People see a boat has a steering wheel and mistake this as being the same technique used to steer a car. In a car, you turn the steering wheel left and it turns the wheels left to move you in that direction without hesitation. In a boat, the wheel is connected to a hydraulic steering system that turns the outdrive (the unit that holds the spinning propeller) the opposite direction. This allow the boat jackknife since the drive will act as a pivot point. In driving a boat, everything you do to drive depends on speed you are traveling. You consistently have to modify how you are operating the boat (giving it gas and steering) based on how fast you are already traveling.
So I’m sorry but no. Just because you can drive a car, does not mean you can be a successful captain on the water. Check back in next week’s blogs to learn more about how to drive a boat without crashing and maybe hear some stories of people who were not able to!
~The Aquaholic
Devyn,
It is interesting to hear about the differences of driving a boat vs. a car. I never knew that you had to turn the steering wheel on a boat the opposite way you wanted to travel. That must get really confusing when you have to drive both a boat and a car!
It’s great to learn about the differences between boats and cars since, I’ll admit I personally did believe this at first, it can be thought that both vehicles are very similar in how they work. But it’s great to now begin to understand their differences to grow my newfound appreciation of boating through reading your blog!
Your blog reminded me of my first boat. My father bought me that old Harris boat. I don’t have my father with me anymore, but this boat still has a part of my heart. Thank you for bringing these memories and emotions back to me.
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