Date: 04 Jan., 2007
Current position: Bent over, sanding
We ended up buying a wooden
rowing / sailing / motoring dinghy kit and are building it in our basement over the winter. Gotta do something to keep the boat spirits active and healthy. The finished product will be 11' 7" long and 4' 8" wide. It breaks apart and the forward part nests inside the aft part, making it a good length for stowing on Rachel's foredeck. Here's a nice write-up about it w/ some pictures:http://www.clcboats.com/notesfromourshop/spring2005.php.
We're pretty excited about it, even though our basement's been turned upside down and we've had to a big clearing out of stuff we've carefully hoarded up over the years to make room for it.
Here's how we came to make the decision:
1) Our now 15 yr. old "rigid inflatable boat" (RIB) that came w/ Rachel is on it's last legs, having gone through two "fix-a-flat" treatments last year. It did manage to survive the season, however, although we felt we were at it's "tender mercies" (M: "pun intended") (J:"whack!") several times.
2) We've (and that's the royal 'we') always thought it would be fun to build a boat, and starting with a kit should give us (and that's the royal 'us') the opportunity to do that w/o too much risk or frustration. We chose the Passagemaker kit because it's light (90 lbs), yet has a payload of 650 lbs, making it a good "utility vehicle".
3) We've heard that they row nicely. That's more than can be said for the inflatable, for sure! And as an added benefit, we both enjoy rowing and it's great exercise.
4) We can also use it with a small (4 hp or less) outboard. This means greatly increased fuel economy at the expense of greatly
decreased top speed. The 10 ft inflatable literally flies w/ its 15 hp 2-stroke outboard. We'll have to wait and see how we feel about that particular trade-off, but the lighter outboard will be easier to put on the dinghy.5) To be perfectly honest, however, the real bottom-line reason is that we've seen other cruisers w/ sailing dinks pottering about in anchorages and it just plain looks like a lot of fun. We remember how much fun we had with our small sailboats and are looking forward to doing more "gunkholing".
We still have the new 8' inflatable we bought for Raven, our previous boat. It stows in a bag and we think it'll fit nicely in "the basement". We plan to keep it, at least for now, as a backup in case the hard dinghy is unavailable for some reason.
So now our basement has been turned into a boat shop. We're busy cleaning, epoxying, sanding, stitching, and gluing, and have both gone a bit "dinghy" as a result.
Mark & Julie
s/v Rachel
