The boat model had over 1700 tris (!) before this redo. I've reduced
the amount of tris to ~150, which is very reasonable given that there
are almost 45 faces to this model.

I've also spent a good hour re-UV unwrapping the entire model which
has a huuuge impact on the boats' appearance. As much as possible,
the boat now looks like it's made out of actual blocks of wood,
and I've even attempted to make the grains connect around edges,
appear in the same pattern and spacing, and generally make it look
like it's just a nice crafted thing out of several pieces of wood.

I've had to tweak the rudder part to make the texture actually have
square texture pixels. I did that by varying the vertical position of
the botton of the rudder handle and the top of the rudder bottom, which
worked well. I also had to 'slice' the rear face of the boat to prevent
a strange texture tear, probably due to non-flat surface somewhere,
but I couldn't spot the issue there anymore after adding 2 extra edges.

This looks totally like a new boat now.

 - http://i.imgur.com/stiVzsa.jpg