Protecting the Dink

[JPA Cate]

"One idea we had was to name it T/T TBA"

Good one, Bash!

A

[Autumns Wind]

Originally Posted by Bash

A good plan to buy the dink and then find a sailboat large enough to match it. Before we owned our first sailboat I owned a 20' RIB. One idea was to name it T/T TBA.

Thats awesome.... Heres what it looks like on our deck. Should be fun. Whistling.

[Kettlewell]

After you're done camouflaging the motor cover, put some retro-reflective tape on it, front, and sides. Helps you to find it when it goes walkabout.

Great idea, and it will help prevent it being run down at night while trailing behind the mothership. I painted my motor cover white, which shows up surprisingly well from a distance. Having your motor a distinctive color helps you to spot yours when sometimes you are say in a shoreside restaurant and want to keep an eye on things on the nearby dinghy landing.

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by David_Old_Jersey

Depends on how big the dink is - for 9' of Avon (non-RIB!) a piece of PVC pipe on a lifeline acts as a roller sufficient to man handle on deck. Albeit a solid stainless steel tube instead of the top lifeline IMO works best / easiest.

I did exactly that...It works pretty good. Better than trash my new $500 lifelines.

[sestina]

I've got a 2.8m inflatable with a 3.3 hp 2 stroke.

Because of the babystay I can't carry anything on the foredeck. So for all passages the dink gets deflated and stowed in the cockpit locker. Assembly takes place on the foredeck. To make launching and recovery easier I've fitted those Harken sail rollers on the top guardwires. They are best arranged in pairs on either side of the stanchions. They also help the genoa too.

[SabreKai]

I've been giving that some thought as I refit Sabre Dance. To that end I picked up a boom from a Grampian 26 which is about 11 feet long. I'm going to cobble up a fitting on my mast, and use my staysail halyard to support it and a cheap and dirty 1000 lb block and tackle on the end. If needs must, the jib halyard can also be attached. It extends out over the side a good 5 feet, so you can use it to lift the dink, or gear off a dock.

I suggest if you have a whisker pole or a spinnaker pole, you might consider that.

[McGinnis]

It's not always locals you have to worry about taking your dink in the middle of the night.

Being unable to pull our dingy onto the bow or even out of the water arriving back to the boat one evening when it was blowing 20 knots. We attached it to the bow eye and then to the stern cleat with a 15' painter. The winds topped off at 55 knots that night and pulled that bow eye right out of the fiberglass floor about 0300. The dingy was found about a half mile behind us on the rocks, the motor in 4' of water with the gas tank floating on top like a buoy.

We learned that lesson the hard way.