A Good Dinghy — Don’t Cast Off Without One
On December 31, 1999, Dena Hankins and James Lane set sail from Seattle, and they’ve been underway in one form or another ever since, but mostly under sail. Dena (novelist and short-story author) is an amazing navigator. James (three novels in) has been a sailor for longer than you … maybe even your kin … anyway, yeah. In 2006, they sailed from S.F. Bay to the Big Island of Hawaii. James was Latitude 38’s nude centerfold that December, a story he regales strangers with to this very day. Today they are sailing their 30-ft electric sailboat around the world with their not-quite-useless cat, Beluga Greyfinger.
The dinghy is not an afterthought! From our current vantage, safe at anchor aboard our Baba 30 electric sailboat SV SN-E Cetacea in Bermuda, it’s a pleasure to recount the dinghy choices (yes, choices!) we’ve experienced … enjoyed … survived.
Our first boat was a Port Ludlow-ported William Garden Sea Wolf ketch that came with a bronze-riveted beauty of a wooden clinker rowing dinghy. We learned how to get around in the world on those two boats (beginning in Eagle Harbor and moving through the San Juans, then south to San Francisco) and, of the two, the dinghy was both safer and so much more fun. We called her Sojourner Earth, and she performed as the perfect commuter vessel across Drayton Harbor (Blaine, Birch Bay, and Semiahmoo, WA) for winter 2000–2001. Sport fishers and terrifyingly adorable 600-pound harbor seals made an adventure of every single morning crossing that bay in a winter of many zeros.
When we downsized our primary vessel from a 48-ft wooden ketch to a fiberglass Gulf 32 pilot house sloop in the San Francisco Bay Area (Emeryville, Richmond, Alameda, Oakland and San Francisco were all homes for us and our new boat in the early 2000s), we got a great deal on an 8-ft Fatty Knees, and that’s when we fell in love with the rowing/sailing dinghy once again. Sojourner Earth had been a joy to row, but she was destroyed in a storm off Cape Mendocino on the way down from Eureka, so when we got another dinghy, we put that Fatty Knees to the test, sailing and rowing in almost every condition and towing it everywhere we went.
After some months exploring India, we decided to check out the East Coast of the US. Our next boat, wintering in Norfolk, VA (before we rescued her upon our return to the US from Goa), came with a Dyer Midget, the absolute most sailing dinghy you can fit on the bow of a Rhodes Chesapeake 32. We named that dink Tinker because we considered ourselves (and totally are) itinerant working people of our world. She was like a kitty to us. She followed us everywhere. Before we started our decade of yo-yo-ing the Eastern Seaboard, we gave Tinker a loving rebuild that strengthened her up but also made her a whole lot heavier. We’d already discovered that two 200-pound adults were too many for her sail plan, but that poor boat spent amazing amounts of time being rowed by us: laundry, groceries, water … a few scant, brave inches of freeboard keeping the water out and the people/stuff in.
and keep it firmly attached to your boat when not in use said the guy in the Turtle Bay HaHa who’s dinghy was found five miles offshore before being returned by a fisherman. ( I hope he was given a huge reward)
Shouldn’t this be a Caption Contest picture?