I admit I didn't think much about how to steer a boat, until I saw some people new to boats attempt it, like my guest in my earlier post. It's funny how children, though, don't seem to have the same problem. Just like when you put a kid on skis, they take to it within an hour or so, while the adults are struggling for hours to do the same thing. When I put my 10 year old granddaughter on the helm of my sailboat, she was doing fine within a couple of minutes. For an adult used to steering a car, handling the steering on a boat takes a lot longer. When I was a kid, my Dad always had a runabout for us to use on the lake where our cottage was. Using the tiller on the outboard, and then the wheel steering with cables to an outboard just seemed natural.
Maybe as we get older, it gets even harder to master boat handling if we are new to it. I had a brother-in-law who bought a nice Grady White 20' cuddy cabin when he retired, which surprised me, since he had never expressed an interest in boating. I went with him a few times to get him used to the boat, but he always did the same thing. He would point the bow in the direction he wanted to go, regardless of current and wind, etc., as if he was driving his car. Eventually, he would wander out of the channel, or run over a lobster pot. After the third time getting towed in with a lobster buoy tangled in his prop, he sold the boat.
