Honestly I'd be doing this in After effects or similar rather than in 3D. Look at the displace effect, you use a black and white image to drive the ripple.
As imagination says - After Effects or similar. Much easier than trying to do something like this in 3D.
If you are set on doing it on 3D the first thing I'd suggest is finding some really good reference so you can be clear on exactly the sort of effect you're aiming for. "Some kind of 3D shockwave" will lead you down a bottomless pit : )
I would use the compositing tag to exclude the environment light from the boat and use an other for the boat always pointing it from the same side (child).
I don't think there was any 'incorrect assumption'. In that particular statement I believe Pitheque was making a point about cloud services in general.
Here is an interesting one - random text to text🙂
AM controls
You can choose the text, random seed, amount of randomness plus some extras such as removal of curly braces, commas and specific characters
Graph
167_Random_Letters.c4d