When I was 20, I had my first exposure to boat recreation in the form of a sailboat. My girlfriend took me sailing in an old dingy with a mast and I was instantly hooked. I went to the book store and bought a book on sailing and took her out on the water the next weekend and showed off my new skills. So started my love affair with sailing and I graduated to larger keelboats - spent 10 summers on a 25' sailboat on Lake of the Woods Ontario and then on a 38' keelboat.
In 2003 I bought my first Sea-Doo, then another in 2004 and another one in 2016, the last one being a Sea-Doo RXT 300. I spent many weekends towing my nephews in tubes on the lake and praying for strong winds so I could jump the high waves. When my kids got old enough to go out of the lake, I started riding with them and my now 12-year-old daughter learned to waterski behind our 2016 Sea-Doo.
With 2 kids and me not as happy banging around on the waves as I used to, I stared considered a boat for the first time a few years ago. While the Sea-Doo was fun banging around on the waves or flying along at 70 mph on a flat lake, it's not really much of a social outing while you are riding, due to noise, wind and the fact you are lined up 3 in a row.
A boat has opened up an opportunity for our family to enjoy the water (OK, not my wife - she gets seasick, so stays home). I have enough room for both kids and a spotter, as well as the kid's friends. We can stop and socialize (the adults) while the kids jump off the swim platform.
While the kids enjoy the boat, they prefer the Sea-Doo due to speed, excitement and wave jumping. They just like the "action" on a Sea-Doo more than the motoring on the boat.
For our family, the perfect mix is to have both. Sadly, these days, my 16' Hobie Cat sits in the yard at our cottage waiting for me to clean it up and take it out. There just doesn't seem to be enough time for 3 toys during our 13-week summer.
One final note re-repair costs; No doubt boats have more systems and those systems are complex, so they must be more expensive to maintain, but I'm hoping my new boat will be more reliable than my Sea-Doos. My first one (2003) started using large amounts of oil after 10 hours and couldn't attain speed. The dealer couldn't fix it after 3 tries and I traded it on a 2004 model (turns out the factory hadn't torqued down the camshaft bolts). The 2004 Sea-Doo was better but went through a couple of wear rings ($500 each - installed) and towards the end of ownership, a known fault with the drive shaft left my nephew marooned out on the lake when the splines stripped damaging the through hull fitting and the unit started taking on water. That was a $700.00 repair. If he and his friends hadn't been close enough to shore the Sea-Doo would have sunk. I sold that unit at the end of the summer and got a new one the following spring.
PWCs live in a very high RPM zone with constant thrashing and in my view, the supercharged models I've owned were prone to supercharger problems - some failures resulting in the requirement to rebuild the complete engine at a cost of a couple of thousand dollars. We'll see how I make out with the boat.
