Boat

A boat is a watercraft designed to plane on, and provide transport over, water. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In Naval terms, a boat is small enough to be carried aboard another vessel (a ship). Boats that are notable exceptions to this concept due to their large size are the riverboat, narrowboat and ferryboat. These examples do, however, generally operate on inland , protected coastal waters. Modern submarines may also be referred to as boats but this is possibly due to the fact that the first submarines could be carried by a ship and were certainly not capable of making offshore passages on their own. Boats are may have military, other government, research, or commercial usage.