Introduction

I have been reading and saving selections from rec.boats for about 8 years, and operating various watercraft for far longer. I volunteered, in August 1992, to maintain this Frequently Asked Questions list for rec.boats, with help from many other people on topics where they know much more than I do.

The contents of the posting below consist of the information sent to me by many people; less than 1/4 of it is my own writing. I am especially grateful to Michael Hughes (no relation) for providing much of the bibliography.

If you have constructive comments please let me know. (I am John Hughes, jfh@cs.brown.edu). If you have additions you'd like to see, please let me know.

Several people have asked that I mark the recent changes with some sort of symbol to indicate the changed passages. As you can see from the dates above, I'm finding it tough to keep up with the "every three months" schedule as is, and I'm reluctant to add any more work to the task. I've therefore not done what they have asked, alas.

The information in this posting comes in three forms. There are facts (addresses and phone numbers, etc.), generally accepted information (``How can I get into sailboat racing as a crew member?''), and opinions (``Is this magazine any good?''). Following a lead of Wayne Simpson, I've put the initials of the provider of the information or opinion in parentheses following the statement (e.g., (jfh)). There's a list of contributors at the bottom. Since I only started doing this *after* I had put together much of the list, a good deal of the information is unattributed, especially in the book reviews. I apologize to the original authors for this.

By the way, my own bias is towards sailboating. This means that the powerboating information is scantier than the sailboating stuff.

In this edition, I've deleted a few questions that seem to have faded from currency, and replaced them with others that seemed more relevant.