So, you want to impress the boating babes and strut down the dock like the king of the marina? Then you have issues – the same ones many boaters do.

Topping the list is how to make Mom's Mink look like a million bucks, even if it's gone a few miles around the track. But never fear. With these top 10 pimp-my-ride tricks, your boat will look like it goes 100 mph even when it's tied to the dock.

IMTRAUnderwater lights will make an eye-popping change to your boat when night falls.

It'll glimmer in the sunshine, shine like a diamond, and be the belle of the ball. You won't even need a pair of fuzzy dice.

WASH AND WAX

Let's start with the simple stuff: We know you wash the boat on a daily basis and wax it weekly"¦don't you? If not, get with it! And after the boat's been thoroughly cleaned, you can kick the shine up a notch on everything with Yacht Brite Serious Shine ($17 for 14 ounces).

Don't expect this stuff to take off the grime, because it's not a cleaner, it's a shiner. But the cool thing about Serious Shine is that it's engineered to work on every surface found on boats, including fiberglass, metals, fabrics, and even rubber. That means anywhere you spot a piece of trim, a bolt head, or a surface of any kind that isn't gleaming, simply give it a spritz and a wipe.

This stuff makes just about anything shine and gives your boat that detailed finish you're looking for.

GARMINPut some color on your dash!

LIGHT IT UP

Draw all eyes to your pride and joy by giving them something really spiffy to see: a set of underwater lights at the transom. You want a light that's strong enough to lure big fish? One that doesn't require any hanging wires, extra batteries or gear in the water?

Imtra's line of through-hull lights, including the IML Underwater Through-Hull, will do the trick. I tested these out while overnighting at the canyons, and I created daylight in the middle of the night – drawing in fish, shrimp, squid, and all kinds of cool sea critters that put on a fascinating display, right behind the boat.

The IML takes a 75-watt MR16 halogen bulb, which is astonishingly bright. The bronze housing is hydrodynamic and corrosion-resistant, and it's accessible from inside the boat for easy bulb changes. This is a seriously heavy-duty unit weighing in at six and a half pounds, and it does require a three-inch cutout in the hull bottom or transom. But that big bronze housing looks bold and stands out even during broad daylight, adding panache regardless of the ambient light conditions. It doesn't come cheap, though, at a cost of $795.

You want more choices? Consult OceanLED, which has a wide variety of underwater boat lights employing, as the name suggests, LEDs. They're particularly nifty because LEDs draw less juice and come in more colors than halogens. While they aren't as bright in intensity as halogens are, they still add a new look that's undeniably cool when the sun goes down.

LENNY RUDOWTreat your ears to some candy, too, with the MTX amp.

HELP YOUR HELM

Does your helm station look dull? Make it modern by switching to color gauges. Garmin's new GMI10 Digital Marine Instrument interfaces with any NMEA 2000 system, and it supports dozens of NMEA 2000 data streams. Nav data, fuel flow, engine data and weather data all can be displayed on a 3.5-inch QVGA 320 x 240 pixel color screen that produces crisp numerals.

Though the 3.5-inch screen is great for viewing numerals or single gauges, it's too small to divvy up among different departments. So, if you want more than a couple of details at the same time, you'll probably need to mount multiple units at the helm (sweet, baby!) and program each to display different data sets.

Maretron can bring your helm into the color world, too, but it tends to offers goodies for the Grey Poupon fleet, with pricing that runs into the thousands. The DSM250 has 5.75-inch-diagonal screens, with an active matrix TFT LCD featuring a 320 x 240 pixel QVGA color display. As a point of reference, that makes these larger and sharper than many above-average fishfinders or chartplotters, and they're advanced enough to display your data in graph format, if you like. And you will like, because it looks wild and boosts your boat's cool rating by a factor of 10.

Another serious cool-boost can be had with Raymarine ST70s, which are engineered on Raymarine's SeaTalk Next Gen data bus, but can also chat with Raymarine's original SeaTalk and SeaTalk2 systems, and of course NMEA 2000. They're a pleasure to view, with crisp color displayed on a transflective TFT QVGA 320 x 240 pixel screen, and they have the ability to display in numeric, graphic, virtual analog and histogram formats.

TURN UP THE TUNES

If your boat is going to feed all the senses, don't reserve the bling for your eyes – your ears deserve candy, too. Besides, what fun is boating without kick-butt tunes?