RE: Hi all I hope all of your holidays are safe,i have a question about boats
Happy Birthday and Happy Retirement. As mentioned above, spead and budget go hand-in-hand as they say.
If you are comfortable with nitro and want to build: Areomarine Laminates is an old stand by. They offer bare boats, boat and hardware kits, and RTR kits. you might also look into Warehouse Hobbies (Gas), Bonzi Sports (Gas), Venom now offers some RTR (GAS) and of course Pro Boat (Gas, Nitro, Electric), Traxxas (Nitro and Electric), there are many others. This is by no means a comprehensive list there are many more on the market just a few I have done business with recently and have found good products and good customer service through.
There are many more on the forum with much more in-depth experience than mine...maybe just a start. If I may, always check with yor local hobby shop as well. I hav found mine a great resource when questions cannot be answered online in a "timely" fashion (my gotta have it patience gets the best of me at times). When he does not know the answer we have fun looking and learning together. His assitance and trust have proven very valuable multiple times.
We share a similar time line of the hobby (although I am a bit younger) and I have moved from electric, to nitro and now to gasoline across the board. I was never very skilled at tuning or maintaining the nitro engines so I quickly shifted to gasonline (weed eater type power) and have not looked back since. The cost of fuel vs nitro is huge and the platofrm for the engines are bullet proof COMPARED to nitro. Of course the bigger engine sizes of the Gasoline (Zenoah and CY) require quite a bit bigger boat platforms and running space.
Just my not-so-humble $0.02