Boating

As long as man has travelled on water, he has boated for pleasure. A fisherman using a flat bottomed punt to skim across a lake in search of fish is a pleasure boater, a family taking a weeklong vacation upon a hired canal boat are pleasure boaters, and the yacht master leading a convoy transversing the Atlantic Ocean is a pleasure boater. In fact, pleasure boating makes up the largest chunk of boat usage, and by far the most revenue for manufacturers and suppliers, globally each year.

Although in certain areas of the globe pleasure boating is almost non-existent, due to the local economy, or more correctly, the local population, being unable to support the expensive pastime of pleasure boating. Indeed, pleasure boating is up at the top of the list of expensive hobbies, along with personal aviation. There is a famous phrase among pleasure boaters; it is that owning a boat is much like owning a hole in the water that you throw money into in an attempt to keep it filled. This is particularly relevant when discussing the more expensive forms of sea going pleasure boats, although in certain countries, owning an operating an inland vessel is becoming almost equally expensive to maintain, licence and insure as a similar sea going vessel. This is mainly due to the introduction of boat worthiness testing, a certificate of which will now be required by insurers before they will supply cover for your boat. This, alongside the expensive inland licensing that has been introduced in some countries, has made owning event eh smallest riverboat an extremely expensive proposition.