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 The term boats and boating defines the activities undertaken by small seagoing or inland water craft, for either pleasure or commercial purposes. The types of boat and variety of endeavours they may undertake is fairly diverse, from simple pleasure cruising to deep sea trawling.
To discuss boats and boating further, we need to ask the question what makes a boat a boat and not a ship. This may seem fairly straightforward at first, but there are certain exceptions which muddy the waters so to speak. A simple way of answering the question would be to state that a ship would need to be big enough to carry a boat and a boat would need to be small enough to be carried by a ship. If we overlook certain craft such as the huge ore boats that ply their trade upon the great lakes and are definitely large enough to be considered a ship, or submarines, some of which are certainly large enough to be called a ship but are still termed a boat, then this simple definition of a boat is pretty accurate.
So now we have defined what a boat actually is, then we can easily start to think of what they are actually used for, we can begin to discuss boating, which is the word used to describe the usage of boats and the associated industry which services it. In a similar fashion to the boat versus ship quandary, it is hard to draw a line between boating and shipping. Some activities, such as deep sea exploration, certainly take a boat into waters that would more traditionally be sailed by ships.
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