You may recall that when we bought Selkie, she came with a 10’ Avon inflatable with an outboard. Soon after getting the boat on the water, we purchased, for a song, a hard rowing and sailing dinghy. The debate of “what’s the best type of tender” has raged on for decades and will rage on for many decades more; we’re not here to settle it. We’re just here to sing the praises of our particular dinghy for our particular situation.
Ms. Bojangles, as she was dubbed early on when the blocks atop her mast would rattle through the night, is an 8’ long solid fiberglass pram. She has no foam or fiberglass core for stiffness, just a wooden gunwale glassed over. The lack of core makes her a bit noisy, and well, not stiff, in a pounding chop, but it also makes her very light. She weighs about 60 lbs, so we can easily walk her above high tide, and lift her via halyard onto the deck for storage.
She does have positive flotation built into bow and stern, so she won’t sink when she flips and fills with water. Yes, we know this for a fact.
She can carry quite a bit of cargo as well: Katie, myself, Wylie, and a dozen bags of groceries and 6 gallons of water. Her waterline drops a bit, but she still moves.
We’ve also put her to the test rowing in and out of chop and stiff winds. We’ve pushed her through a choppy 25 knots, and while by no means spritely, she did get us there. We row everyday, so everyday we get stronger and everyday it gets easier.
The only drawback is that she’s a little long for our foredeck storage, but that’s not a knock on Bojangles, we just have a tiny sailboat. It’s cocked to the side a bit, but we lash her down tight and she hasn’t gone anywhere yet, and we’ve put her through the test a few times.
Every time a panga races by and we get a big whiff of gasoline, we thank our lucky stars that we gave away that Sea Cow outboard and its leaky, awkward, unrowable mothership.
Well damn, I guess we did settle it after all.
Hey guys. I discovered your blog months ago and am really enjoying them. I was so happy to see your dinghy developments and couldn’t agree more with the concept. My boat came with a sinking deflatable and one day after swimming and towing it ashore (dangerly impossible to row in 25knt), I went out in a panic and forked over 1.5k on a new one and an outboard. That’s why y’all are cruising and I’m cooped up in an office right now!
Cheers!
We found it impossible to row our “deflatable” (I like that term), in all but calm weather. At least your outboard is new, and hopefully more reliable than ours was. Cheers.
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