Americana Outdoors E-Magazine - June 2020

BOATING TO THE RESCUE! An article from our friends at Yamaha Marine

gone through and even if parents reassure them, they’re probably fearful right now. Fortunately, boating offers one of the best ways a family can responsibly have fun together outside the home and at the same time demonstrate to the young ones the sky isn’t falling. And when this pandemic finally abates, time spent on the water will likely be the best memories from these scary times. Is It Okay to Go Boating with My Family? If your family is living as a unit under one roof, boating together poses little additional risk to contracting the COVID-19 virus providing you keep your distance from other boaters, which is easy since your vessel acts as a fiberglass or aluminum buffer. In normal times, inviting friends and extended family members to join you is automatic but for the time being, it’s better to go boating only as a family. In fact, in many areas, recreational boating is still restricted to 10 or fewer people to a boat and, in some places, it’s limited to those who live together. A great resource to find out if your area has any restrictions can be found at

It’s Times Like These That Highlight the Benefits of Boating. What a difference a few months makes. In mid- March, many of the nation’s outdoor recreational activities were shut down due to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Authorities in many hard-hit states like Washington, Michigan, New York and Maryland were taking no chances and prohibited most recreational boating within their borders. Now that we’re edging into summer, boating in all 50 states has opened up again. And if ever we needed boating in our lives, now’s the time. For the last few months, most of us have followed the recommendations and orders to stay at home — isolated from others whenever possible. But a family can only do so many jigsaw puzzles or binge watch TV for so long before the onset of cabin fever. Constantly watching the news and surfing the web to see what’s going on in the world can also take a toll on a family’s well being. For young kids, this is likely the first crisis they’ve ever