Ok, my SECOND copy of Oblivion is now in the post and due at mine tomorrow YAAAYYYYYY
I'm having a second copy cause now I have a PC...and my PS3 kind of broke, so yeah...

I've heard that there is an alternative start mod where you start off on a ship, are there any other alt. start mods, or is this the best one?

The one you're talking about is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11495, which is pretty good and popular. My personal favorite, though, is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23757 - this one lets you start in a variety of places, as a member of any (one) guild and/or as a vampire, and with varying levels of wealth. The only problem: if you have lots of mods that add stuff at the beginning, like Open Cities, you might get stuck in the character generation area. I usually bypass this by quickly making a character and waiting to do facial adjustments until I get into Tamriel (since I do a lot of tweaking anyway, it's no big deal for me).