Curious about the boat rentals at Poly. The small ones that seat two.
Does one need boating experience to rent these? Do they provide any instruction? Do you need anything aside from your driving license?
We did it in April. It is really inexpensive.
You only have to be 12 to drive-and drive alone as well.
My dh took my dd12 and I took my dd15.
I wasn’t comfortable. It was fun. I would do it again but here are the probles—
While you can see a lot and explore, you are dodging the resort boats and the big ferry and a fair amount of other boats in bay lake and in 7 seas lagoons.
There are lots of 12 year olds whose parents just said go for it and they drive around like yahoos.
The “coast guard” Disney boats stay near the ferry to try to keep you safe but I can only figure it’s just a matter of time before there is an accident.
The canal between the top bodies of water is a super tight squeeze.
It was fun. I was scared but my kids loved it.
Sorry. I just read the rest of your question. I think just drivers license. We charged it to the room. And you got life vests and maybe 5 Mins of instruction.
I could say something that concerns me about letting 12 year olds out on that water alone in boats where accidents are predicted to happen above
I hope parents and the kids have the potential dangers clearly laid out to them before being allowed in the boats and it’s not assumed that they have all pre-researched all the potential dangers
Can’t see how a parent would let a 12 year old go out in them alone if they were made aware of the risks
But again I find it strange that Disney allows this to happen knowing there are risks
They focus so heavily on safety and preventing accidents in so many other ways in their parks
But that’s a whole other thread and I’m not going to go there
Here’s the link:
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/recreation/motorized-boats/
For ID, it says valid resort id (I didn’t realise this was restricted to onsite guests actually), plus drivers licence, state-id or military id.
That would scupper me, although I guess they’d take a passport.
I agree with all of the above! I saw the page that you share @Nicky_S but I thought to myself - it can’t be accurate that that’s all you need. I would have hoped they would require a person to show their boating license from their home state (then again, do all states require them?).
If they allow a 12 year old to ride them alone, then the Id is simply a security measure, to check it matches the resort I’d. Kind of like a deposit in case you abscond with it???!
Clearly they feel anyone can handle these things. To my shame I remember DS asking to do a boat rental at BC, he must have been 14. I just kind of said “maybe later on in our trip” 'cos I was terrified at the thought of him colliding with a friendship boat.