Personally, I would rather just skip the time on the boat and the whole disassociated sea tour thing, and spend that time flying. The career track for me is:
FIRST DUTY ASSIGNMENT: 3 to 3.5 (max) years at my first operational P3 Squadron (either VP - Patrol or VQ - Recon). Right now I am in the home stretch of finishing up my FRS for VP.
SECOND DUTY ASSIGNMENT: After the first tour, you can go instruct in T34C (Corpus/Whiting), C12/T44 for Advanced in Corpus, T45 in Kingsville, or at the P3 FRS, this is a 2 - 2.5 year tour. You can also get a good deal tour and fly with the Brits or other nationalities with an Officer exchange tour. If you don't want to fly, you can also put your name in for a Flag LT slot, or work in various Staff jobs that are available. One of the IPs I know went from his first tour to a job at NORAD on a joint staff tour.
THIRD DUTY ASSIGNMENT: 2 years disassociated sea tour. There are ways to get around this, if you extended on your first two assignments, then you probably ate up your seven year commitment from wings. But for me, I will probably have 3 months left, plus 3 more to go till retirement, so knowing my luck I will be over a barrel and have to go the boat.
Basically this is everything I have been able to learn to date, I am sure there is a bunch of stuff that I am unaware of, and will learn in due time. But this is the general off the cuff answer.
As for getting stuck on Steve's boat (haha, everyone is picking up my phraseology Steve! Honestly though Steve is right, in the skimmer and bubblehead Navy, you refer to subs as "boats" and surface vessels as "ships") well, you generally get put on a carrier as ANAV or something like that, god, those moboard and nav skills I learned in college will actually come to some fruition!