When we got our boat in 1998 (a monohull - CSY44) the dinghy was stored upsidedown on the foredeck, and I couldn't sit at the helm and see over it. It is a Japanese brand inflatable and it came with a 10 hp Johnson motor which has never worked well.
The very first thing we did after we got the boat was to get dinghy davits for it. The last 12 years have showed me that even just in coastal cruising, a towed dinghy is a hazard. There are some folks who say that the dinghy should not be in davits either if you are making a passage. I think they are right, but we haven't done that so far, and probably won't, so that's not really a concern for us. We have a radar arch with the davits and have the radar, wind gen, and TV antenna plus two solar panels on the davits which works well for us. After a year or so, we also bought a second hand PortaBote which I really like. You can't puncture it and it can be used on a rocky shore. You can swamp it but not really sink it. We can assemble it on the foredeck and use the whisker pole as a crane to get it over the side into the water. It can also be rowed better than the inflatable, and has actual seats instead of sitting on the tubes or the bottom. I have seen this type dinghy on davits, but it wouldn't be the ideal way to do it. It can also take the two of us (probably 315 lbs between us) and a full load of groceries and bottles to fill for water. We have a little Danforth type anchor that came with it, but we almost never anchor, so we don't use it much. For both of them, we mostly use a little Evenrude that we got with a small open trailerable boat (a boat and trailer which we've now sold). The motor works well although it is not speedy. When we are going through he cut between Key West and Fleming Key against the tide it takes us at least half an hour. But we almost never store the motor on the inflatable on the davits - one time we did that, we ran into a storm in the Chesapeake. (The forecast said 15-20 knots of wind decreasing to 10 knots and instead of decreasing to 10, the wind increased to 25-30.) The waves got bigger and bigger and were very close together. I estimate 8 feet. We were only doing about 2 knots over the ground against the wind. The boat was rearing up, banging down into a wave trough and green water was washing back with considerable spray back to the dodger. We had the dinghy on the davits with the motor still on it because we had been going to use it to go to dinner the previous night, and when it rained, we decided to eat on the boat, Bob just hadn't re-stowed the motor. The solar pane was mounted on an aluminum brace between the davits. The extra weight of the dinghy motor made the brace work loose. The solar panel was torn off with the brace and disappeared which made the dinghy fly and bang around because the brace was gone. Bob kept having to go back (clipped to jacklines) to re secure the dinghy. He eventually lashed it to the radar arch in a vertical configuration. When we would turn downwind so he could do that, we'd be going 9 knots in the wrong direction. We had been going to go from Hampton to a marina at Windmill Point, but I lobbied for going in the York River instead. We were right at the entrance anyway. So we did. But it took us 4 hours to get into the York River enough for the waves to decrease. _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
