Captaining your own boat can be a great experience, providing you with a sense of freedom which is incomparable to anything else in the world, but it can also be dangerous to do so when you aren’t fully prepared for what the task entails. Unlike other methods of transportation, if your boat breaks down, you are left stranded in the open ocean, which anybody will tell you is a dangerous situation. This leads me to the main prerequisite of operating your own boat; you need to have some mechanic skills. The ability to fix a problem with your boats mechanics is very important, even if you are only able to perform a temporary fix, as you may need to drive back to land in order to survive. Other skills which you should learn before you start an ocean voyage as a captain is some map reading skills and basic ocean navigation skills. Much of this has been made easier with GPS, and computer analysis, but having some skills and knowledge in the case of catastrophic failure is always a good choice.
