59 Fun Facts About Boating

When facing the bow of a boat, which side is starboard?

Right. Starboard comes from the Old English steorbord, the steering side, because ships were once steered with an oar hung over that side.

Which colour navigation light does a boat show on its port side?

The rule of thumb is that a red port light tells the other skipper "you must give way".

What word did the Royal Navy use for the left side of a ship before 1844?

Larboard. It was too easily confused with starboard, so the Admiralty ordered 'port' to be used instead, and the US Navy followed suit two years later.

A knot is a speed of one what per hour?

Nautical mile. It is about 15% longer than a land mile and matches one minute of latitude on a chart, which is why ships and aircraft still navigate by it.

The knot takes its name from what speed-measuring device sailors threw over the stern?

A chip log. The wooden board stayed put in the water while the ship sailed on, and sailors counted the knots in its line that ran out before a sand-glass emptied.

Which nautical unit of length began as the span of a man's outstretched arms?

Fathom, six feet, from an Old English word for outstretched arms. Sounding the depth with it gave English a verb: to fathom something is to get to the bottom of it.

What is the toilet on a boat called?

The head. The name comes from sailing ships, whose crews relieved themselves up at the bow, the head of the vessel.

What is the bilge of a boat?

The lowest compartment of the hull, where leaks, rain and spills all drain. The stagnant water there smells so foul that 'bilge' became slang for nonsense.

How is 'gunwale', the top edge of a boat's hull, pronounced?

Gunnel, to rhyme with tunnel, and it is often spelled that way too. The odd spelling remembers the 'gun wale', the stout plank that once carried a warship's guns.

On a small boat, an outboard motor is typically bolted to which part of the hull?

The transom, the flat panel across the stern. Hung there, the whole motor swivels to steer the boat, so a small outboard boat needs no rudder at all.

The word "yacht" comes from a Dutch word meaning what?

Hunt. The Dutch jacht was a light, fast ship built for the chase, and only later did the name pass to boats that the wealthy sailed for pleasure.

Which sailing trophy, first won in 1851, is the oldest still contested in international sport?

The America's Cup. It is named not after the country but after the schooner America, which beat a fleet of British yachts around the Isle of Wight to win it.

The word "dinghy" was borrowed into English from languages of which country?

India. Dingi is the Hindi and Bengali word for a small boat, and the odd spelling with its silent h is a leftover of that borrowing.

The oldest boat ever found, the 10,000-year-old Pesse canoe, was made from what?

A hollowed pine log. When doubters said it was only a cattle trough, the Dutch museum that keeps it built an exact copy in 2001 and a canoeist paddled it round a pond.

The word 'kayak' comes from the language of which Arctic people?

The Inuit. Their qajaq was worked by men alone, which is why the big open umiak that carried women and children became known as the woman's boat.

Germany's Klepper company made its name in the early 1900s with which kind of boat?

Folding kayaks. A Klepper packs down into carry bags yet is so seaworthy that in 1956 the German doctor Hannes Lindemann crossed the Atlantic alone in one.

Olympic canoeing has two disciplines: sprint and which other?

Slalom. Its Olympic debut at Munich 1972 ran down the first artificial white-water course ever built, and the event then vanished from the Games for twenty years.

Who built the first commercially successful outboard motor, reportedly after rowing across a lake for ice cream?

Ole Evinrude. He rowed some five miles in the heat to fetch ice cream for Bess Cary, who married him and ran the business side while he built the motors.

What is a boat with two parallel hulls called?

A catamaran. The name is a misfit: the Tamil kattumaram means 'tied wood' and described a raft of logs lashed together, with no twin hulls at all.

Which classic sailor's knot forms a fixed loop at the end of a rope?

Bowline. Under load it neither slips nor jams, yet it comes undone easily afterwards, which is why sailors trust it to tie a mooring line to a ring or post.

To advertise his Mercury outboards, Carl Kiekhaefer ran a team that won two straight 1950s titles in which sport?

NASCAR. His big Chrysler 300s, lettered for Mercury Outboards, turned up in covered transporters with uniformed crews and took the 1955 and 1956 championships.

Which Japanese carmaker entered the outboard market in 1964 with a four-stroke, when nearly every rival sold two-strokes?

Honda. The two-strokes that ruled the market were lighter and cheaper but left their oil in the water, so the company bet on cleaner four-strokes from its very first outboard.

Which boat was invented in 1952 by laying a wooden platform across two rows of welded steel barrels?

Pontoon boat. Ambrose Weeres wanted something steadier on a calm lake than an ordinary hull, and demand for his barrel-floated platform soon had him running a boat company.

Which boat maker's founder sat in a floating hull as it was sawn in half for Life magazine in 1961?

Boston Whaler. The foam-filled hull stayed afloat in two pieces, and founder Dick Fisher motored off in the stern half.

Jet Ski is a trademark of which company, which launched the stand-up watercraft in the early 1970s?

Kawasaki. The brand caught on so completely that people now call any personal watercraft a jet ski, whoever built it.

Which watercraft brand did snowmobile maker Bombardier launch in 1968 and drop just two years later?

Sea-Doo. Meant to repeat the success of its snowmobiles on water, the first model was dogged by engine trouble, and the name stayed on the shelf until 1988.

Water skiing was invented in 1922 by Ralph Samuelson at Lake City, on the upper Mississippi River in which state?

Minnesota. After days of failed starts on Lake Pepin, the teenager found the trick was to lean back and keep his ski tips above the water.

Which Florida attraction, founded by Dick Pope Sr., made water skiing world-famous through its ski shows?

Cypress Gardens opened in 1936 as a quiet botanical garden; the ski shows began during World War II, staged to entertain soldiers who came to visit.

What was Tony Finn's 1985 wakeboarding precursor called, a nod to the two sports it combined?

Skurfer. Shaped like a small surfboard, it floated so high that getting up from deep water took real strength, and easier-starting wakeboards replaced it in the 1990s.

Ken Warby built Spirit of Australia in his backyard and in 1978 used it to set which record?

Water speed. The wooden jet boat hit 317.6 mph on Blowering Dam, and two later attempts to beat it, in 1980 and 1989, killed their drivers.

Wilhelm Maybach and which partner tested the first petrol-engined boat on the Neckar in 1886?

Gottlieb Daimler. Two years later he gave one of his motorboats, named Marie, to Germany's chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

The Harmsworth Cup, first contested in 1903, was the first international trophy in which sport?

Motorboat racing. Newspaper owner Alfred Harmsworth set it up as a contest between nations rather than drivers, and the first winner averaged under 20 mph.

Bernie Little's unlimited hydroplanes raced from 1963 to 2004 under the name of which beer?

Budweiser. After driver Dean Chenoweth died in a 1982 crash, Little's team pioneered the enclosed safety cockpit that the sport later made mandatory.

Which fast offshore powerboat, a favourite of smugglers, shares its name with a racing team founded by Don Aronow?

Cigarette. Aronow later built the Blue Thunder catamarans that US Customs used to chase smugglers in fast boats like the ones he had made famous.

Which rescue craft was developed by students and staff at Atlantic College, a boarding school in Wales?

Rigid inflatable boat. The college passed the design to Britain's lifeboat charity, the RNLI, which named its Atlantic-class lifeboats after the school.

Which maker of inflatable boats began in 1896 building balloons and airships?

Zodiac. One of its airship engineers built inflatable boats for naval aviators in the 1930s, and Alain Bombard's 1952 Atlantic crossing in one made the brand famous.

In dragon boat racing, what does the person sitting at the very front of each boat do?

Beats a drum. The races are said to recall villagers who rushed out in boats to save the poet Qu Yuan, who drowned himself in a river in 278 BC.

O.G. Schmidt, the North Dakota founder of Minn Kota, is credited with introducing which electric boating device in 1934?

Trolling motor. The company's name comes from its home in Fargo, which sits on the state line: Minn for one side, Kota for the other.

The Danforth anchor, with two flat triangular flukes, was invented in the 1940s for use on what?

It is light and stows flat, but tends to skate over gravel and weeds; the Northill anchor was the one designed for seaplanes.

The CQR anchor, patented in 1933 by mathematician Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, has a fluke shaped like which farm tool?

A plough. Taylor, best known for his work on turbulence, was a lifelong sailor who cruised his own cutter as far as Norway's Lofoten Islands.

In anchoring, what does "scope" mean?

The ratio of rode length to water depth. Seven to one is the usual advice, so anchoring in 10 feet of water means letting out about 70 feet of line.

Under international collision rules, what must two power-driven boats meeting head-on both do?

Alter course to starboard. Rule 14 makes both boats give way so they pass port side to port side; when paths cross instead, the boat with the other on its starboard side keeps clear.

The COLREGs "rules of the road" were adopted in 1972 by which organisation?

International Maritime Organization. The big change was backing traffic separation schemes, the one-way shipping lanes first tried in the Dover Strait in 1967.

In the Americas (IALA Region B), which colour of buoy marks the port side of a channel as you enter harbour?

Green. The two-region scheme replaced some 30 rival buoyage systems; Region B also covers Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and everywhere else the colours swap sides.

In 2024 US Coast Guard figures, what did 87% of boaters who drowned have in common?

They wore no life jacket. That matters because drowning accounts for more than two-thirds of all boating deaths.

In the US Coast Guard's 2024 report, what was the leading known contributing factor in fatal boating accidents?

Alcohol use. Sun, wind, engine noise and the motion of the boat speed up impairment, so a drink hits harder afloat than ashore.

What was Captain John Ross Ward's 1854 RNLI life vest, ancestor of the life jacket, made of?

Cork. In the 1861 Whitby lifeboat disaster the sole survivor, Henry Freeman, lived because he alone was wearing one of the new jackets.

The inflatable life preserver patented by Peter Markus in 1928 picked up which nickname from wartime aircrew?

Mae West. An inflated wearer looked as buxom as the film star, and airmen who survived ditching at sea could join the Goldfish Club.

In which region did the flat-bottomed jon boat become popular for river float fishing in the late 1800s?

The Ozarks. Its flat bottom suited the region's shallow rivers, and local guides built a float-fishing trade taking visiting anglers downstream in them.

Once a planing boat gets up to speed, what happens to its draft?

It decreases as the hull lifts. Less hull in the water means less drag, which lets a planing boat beat the speed limit that waterline length sets on a displacement hull.

Kettuvallam houseboats, converted rice barges, take tourists through the backwaters of which Indian state?

Kerala. The name means a boat made by tying: the planks are lashed together with coconut-fibre rope, without a single nail, then sealed with resin from cashew shells.

Which US city is known for its floating homes on Lake Union and Portage Bay?

Seattle. Tom Hanks's widower lives on one in Sleepless in Seattle, a far cry from the 1930s, when more than 2,000 floated on the city's lakes and many were shacks built as cheap shelter.

In 1940, hundreds of private boats nicknamed the 'Little Ships' helped rescue Allied troops from which port?

Dunkirk. The beaches shelved so gently that destroyers could not get near, so small boats ferried soldiers out to them; even so, most of the men left from the harbour's long breakwater.

Which type of naval vessel is traditionally called a 'boat' no matter how large it is?

A submarine. The word itself is short for 'submarine boat'; otherwise, in naval terms, a boat is a vessel small enough to be carried aboard a ship.

The Plimsoll line was introduced on vessels to prevent what?

Overloading. MP Samuel Plimsoll was so furious at the shipowners blocking his bill that he caused an uproar in the Commons in 1875; the law passed the next year and the mark took his name.

Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 comic novel Three Men in a Boat follows a boating holiday on which river?

The Thames. Jerome set out to write a serious guide to the river's scenery and history, but the comic asides took over, and the book has never been out of print.

In the EU's 1994 Recreational Craft Directive, category D boats were designed for which waters?

Rivers, canals and small lakes. Category D meant winds up to Force 4 and waves of half a metre; the 2013 rewrite dropped the place names and defines all four categories by wind and wave height alone.

In the 1840s Joseph-Louis Lambot, a farmer in Provence, built a small boat from wire mesh and which material?

Cement. Lambot had been making water tanks the same way on his farm; the boat went on show at the 1855 Paris world's fair, and he is remembered as a father of reinforced concrete.

What does the punter use to propel a traditional punt on the rivers of Oxford and Cambridge?

A pole. After each shove the trailing pole doubles as the rudder; Cambridge punters stand on the flat deck at the back, while Oxford tradition is to stand inside the boat.