Ironically, another sailing/boating-oriented list just had a dinghy-towing discussion. For me, towing a dinghy anywhere except in well protected coastal or inland waters is a Really Bad Idea. If the dinghy's painter or bridle/tow rig doesn't break or the dinghy doesn't swamp, it'll come charging at your transom in following seas and try pretty hard to join you in the cockpit.
Just recently another cruiser here told of having to build himself a new dinghy after the dinghy he was towing along the coast of Nicaragua "just disappeared." The guy mentioned in a previous post had the nerve to complain about a dinghy-towing device failing after towing a dinghy in rough following seas? Because the device can't handle towing while doing serious off-shore sailing? Really? People tow tenders and dinghies and such while blue-water sailing? Talk about asking for trouble, then being upset when trouble happens ... But whatever. JMHO; diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks. Phil s/v Cynosure Bahia de Caraquez At 03:48 PM 8/25/2010 -0400, you wrote: >On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 02:59:04PM -0400, Ed Kelly wrote: > > We lucked out in finding an alternative to davits or > > conventional towing. > > > > We loved the ability to use a DINGHY-Tow device. > > www.dinghy-tow.com > > Its patented by a Canadian inventor. > >I'd looked into one of those a couple of years ago; there are a lot of >people who like them and recommend them, and there are lots of glowing >testimonials on the site. However, searching the Net turned up a couple >of failure reports that were pretty horrible - as I recall, one guy was >in rough following seas, and had a really bad time when the whole >shebang broke and he couldn't untangle it. Someone else reported rusting >problems (the company told him to _grease_ the stainless.) I just >searched again, and couldn't find the first report - couldn't remember >enough keywords - but the second one is here: > >http://tinyurl.com/23emqhz > >Most people's complaint seems to be that it just isn't sturdy enough for >serious off-shore sailing. _______________________________________________ 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
