wrote in message
...
On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:43:38 -0600, "SteveB"
wrote:

Do I need a special boat to go on a lake?

Quite the contrary. You need a special boat to go in salt water. Even
ignoring sea conditions (the Great Lakes can be quite nasty), you
still need a different level of corrosion resistance.
Guys bring boats down here that lived happily on a lake in Ohio for a
decade to find that salt tears them up in a year.
The other observation I have about small lake boating is they do not
consider things like mooring lines, cleats and ground tackle to be all
that important. On a small lake, if the boat floats away, your
neighbor will call you and have you come over and get it.
My friends in the lake area north of Tampa typically tie up their boat
with clothes line, lamp cord or whatever and on the dock end it might
just be a wad of overhand knots, wedged between the deck boards. An
"anchor" might just be a concrete sprinkler doughnut or whatever they
had laying around. Carrying safety equipment is generally pretty
spotty.

I suppose if you trailer into a regularly patrolled lake the safety
thing has to be a bit better. These guys never see a boat cop.

I never had the desire to own a salt water boat. I spent six years in the
Gulf of Mexico on various craft. In those six years, I learned that I did
not want to be in salt water in a small craft. I DID do some fishing in the
brackish marshes of southern Louisiana, but that is as close as I came to
salt water boating. I was a passenger and hand on many various vessels, and
we did a lot of fishing offshore before the snapper laws were enacted. I
have seen firsthand the effects on anything metallic when exposed to salt
water.

Steve