This is a tough one for me, because I had way too many "first" boats. It's almost like explaining who was your first girlfriend:reddevil:......
Real first boat, my Dad gave my brother and I a 10' green fiberglass fishing boat. It must have weighed about a hundred pounds and it had a 3hp, really old, Johnson. Would only plne out if my brother, or I, sat way out on the bow and hit a wave perfectly. So we got a 5 1/2 Evinrude. Made it plane out no problem. That worked so well we "borrowed" one of my grandfathers 18 Johnson's. It was a wonder we didn't die! But it stayed together and we knew speedboating was in our future.
My second "first" boat was a kneebanger hydro. Raced a couple seasons at contests I had time to go to. But I never really got into it bigtime because I was also racing motocross, desert, and road on motorcycles. That was pretty much full time for spare time. The hydro race would have to be really close and nothing else going on.
Then, my third "first" boat was a 15 1/2 Glastron Carlson with a 115 Evinrude. Day after the Bond movie came out I had to have one. Anyway, ran that one all over the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, plus many of the reservoirs in Oregon and Washington. Got beat by a StarCraft, which I'll never forget because it was a performance model fiberglass boat, not aluminum. So, traded the 115 off on a 235. That Glastron was a handful then. :drool5:
Favorite near death experience in that boat. We used to wake jump, (we had no bayous in Oregon and Washington to do a real Bond), and at around 45 to 50, if you hit the big cruiser wakes just right at the back of the transom where the first big roller came off you could really fly. Well, for some dumbazz reason, a friend and I were out and the perfect wake jump cruiser was a 70 Tolley Yachtfisher. One was out, people were all over the place, and I decided wide-open was a good idea. I will always remember the look on the guys face driving the Tolley when we went by looking down at him. We landed on the transom, buried about half the boat underwater it seemed, I was so shocked at how high we had been I never backed off the throttle. The engine kept running, went jumped back out from the water. Both seats were broken off their mounts and the footpad board dealie was broken off. Other than that, no issues. That's the boat I really call my first boat.