It’s easy to think of a boring strategy that is clearly better than random guessing, but I’m sure you can do better and I agree it seems interesting to think about how you could do better. Surely knowing there is nothing in one space adjusts the probability of something being in the surrounding spaces up to a distance where a boat could overlap with that space.
And even the game theory perspective pretty much assumes you are playing against a blank slate when you might be able to discern things about your opponent, especially over multiple games.
Then again, no one ever fired at “under the left cushion of the couch downstairs” so I had that game on lock.
