Boat Cards

Unlock one of our favorite tools for making connections on the water and forging friendships on our Great Loop Adventure.

Boat cards are like business cards but for boaters. It’s an easy way to share contact information and remember the people you met during your Great Loop Adventure.

Creating Your Boat Cards

You should consider including your boat name, your name, your blog or website, and any contact information you’d like a new friend to have. Don’t include any information you don’t want to share with others on your boat card. 

We’ve added a map to our boat cards, as we tend to talk to many non-boaters at libraries and playgrounds; the map helps us explain America’s Great Loop.

Ideas of what you might include:

• Your Names
• Your Boat Name (if your boat name is tricky to say correctly, add a written pronunciation, too!)
• A picture of you
• A picture of your boat
• URLs to your website, blog, etc
• QR code to make it easy to scan and go to a URL
• Contact information
• Home Port
• A map of America's Great Loop (this makes it easier to explain)

TIP: You'll also want to print on non-shiny paper; this will make it easier for people to jot down a note about where they met you or any other quick info they want to keep associated with you and your card.

If you have kids, having boat cards is an exciting way to meet new people and share your adventures. My kids love handing a new friend a boat card, showing them the map of our journey, and explaining what the Loop is to people.

Many online ordering systems (I like Moo.com) allow you to design your boat cards right on their website. Otherwise, you can use photo or text editing software on your devices or one of the many templates and designs on Canva.com.

What to do with Collected Boat Cards

When you get a boat card from another cruiser, jot down a few notes like the date and where you met this boater on the card to help you remember.

We've placed the cards we collected from other people (mostly boat cards, but some businesses we wanted to remember) into a business card binder.

Our boat card collection has helped us remember if we’ve met another boat before (and where). Giving out boat cards has made it easy to meet people, make friends, and share our adventures with others.

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