We had several boats when I was growing up, sail boats to be exact, as Dad did not care for powered vessels.
Dad was a great and experienced sailor and navigator. He had learned to sail on Lake Erie while growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, and joined the merchant navy during the war, sailing to Saipan in the Pacific to deliver aviation fuel to the American bombers wreaking their devastation on Japan. It was during this time that he heard about New Zealand and eventually decided that we could all move there, sight unseen, in 1963.
Mom on the other hand was not a good sailor and did not care for boats at all, but she was a good sport. Dad built his first sailboat in the garage of our house when we were living in Seattle. Nobody could think of a name for it so it was called Nameless, and so off we went out into Puget Sound in this small sailboat. Of course my sister and I had to go too and I don't remember much about these voyages apart from it being very cold, stormy, and Mom getting seasick.
When Mom and Dad were thinking about immigrating to New Zealand, Dad suggested sailing there. By that time, he had bought an old double-ender called Galeta (this Spanish word translating, I think, to 'biscuit') that while sea-worthy, did not impress Mom at all. Sailing across the Pacific with two young kids (and my tendency to leap gaily overboard, sometimes unintentionally) in a boat called biscuit ... well, she put her foot down and we came down on the trusty P & O liner Orcades.
New Zealand offered splendid opportunities for Dad's sailing, and we sailed alot in the Hauraki Gulf when I was growing up, either on boats he owned or on those belonging to friends.
Unfortunately Dad wasn't too flash with maintenance. The boats were seaworthy, in that they didn't take on water, but other details were overlooked. One year my brother and his partner came to visit from the USA. The boat Dad had at the time was a 28-footer and quite nice, but when we motored out and got ready to set sail, an old bird's nest crashed out of the mainsail as it unfurled, and on the way home, the engine overheated and Dad took water to it by pushing a hose into the toilet (known on board as the 'head') which my brother and I had to keep full by pouring buckets of seawater down it, no easy feat, dunking a bucket on a rope into heavy seas, pulling on board, then lowering down into the toilet.
'Never again,' my brother said after that day.