You are going to turn the default Blender cube into an attractive boat, similar to the one shown in the following screenshot. First, you need to know a little bit about boats. The front is called the bow, and sounds like bowing to the Queen. The rear is called the stern or the aft. The main body of the boat is the hull, and the top of the hull is the gunwale, pronounced "gunnel".
You will be using a technique called Box Modeling to make the boat. Box modeling is a very standard method of modeling. As you might expect from the name, you start out with a box, and sculpt it like a piece of clay to make whatever you want. There are three methods that you will use in most of the instances for box modeling: extrusion, subdividing edges, and moving vertices, edges, and faces.