SHORT TACKS: Getting A Charge Out Of Electric Boats

By Len Bose

Hello, everyone my name is Len Bose, and I have been a yacht broker in Newport Beach for 22 years. I’ve been sailing for more than 35 years, and I should be around for another three-plus decades before I give up the tiller.

I asked Tom Johnson and Bill Lobdell if I can take a trick at the helm on reporting the harbor news in the Daily Voice. I only had to buy them lunch and tell them a couple of yarns before they casted me from the dock. As I sailed away I heard Bill yell over the water, "Convince our readers to go yachting!" No problem, I thought to myself, I can do that!

So as I sailed away from the dock and before I reached M mark I looked under my boom and noticed 12 ladies having a bachelorette party on a 21-foot electric Duffy boat. Now that brings back good times! I can write books of all the fun I’ve have had in bay launches.

From my college days of going from Woody’s to Snug Harbor and then going for a midnight swim down the water slides at Lido Isle Yacht Club, the Bay Club and the Dunes singing and laughing the whole way around the bay. To a couple of years later, I got lucky, no pun intended, the night my wife accepted my proposal to marriage just under the Lido bridge next to Z mark in a electric Duffy.

Now these days, I take sunset cruises with my wife and friends. We also spend time on the water taking my 10-year-old son out on scavenger hunts with his friends or dressing up as pirates and terrorizing the harbor. So are you asking yourself, how can I get in on some of this fun?

It’s simple, call Lee at Duffy Boats Rentals at (949) 645-6812 or you could spend hours just going through its web page gathering your ideas for your cruise. There is something for everyone cruising the bay and like Lee told me, “There is no wrong day to go out on a Duffy.”

I just booked a boat for my wife and I to take a sunset cruise this weekend for three hours. I requested a pu-pu platter from one of the local restaurants, and I plan on stopping by Rolfs wine store and grabbing a couple good bottles of wine. Just at sunset, I plan on switching the iPod to some of Dean Martin's greatest hits and heading straight for z mark just next to the Lido Bridge. That’s amore, baby!

Len's Lessons 345 through 353: While cruising the harbor in an electric boat stay to the right of everyone. But remember not to get close to the docks, those overhanging anchors from the big boats will sneak up on you and grab you. Never go under bridges, stay out of the mooring, never go against the grain of traffic, know where the lifejackets are on the boat, pay close attention to your check-out person on the dock and take your pirate's eye patch off while driving because you never know when the next bachelorette party will cruising by.

On my next tack I am headed down to Ensenada to deliver a 40-racing sailboat I just sold to an Australian fellow. I promised him I would get the boat on the yacht path transport ship where the boat will be loaded up to be taken to its new home in Thailand.

Sea ya.

Len Bose