A day of boat stuff

Puttered around doing a bit of work on the boat. Discovered I'd glued a couple pieces of wood on the transom wrong. The top went on the bottom and the bottom on the top. Minor problem. Cutting it out and regluing new pieces shouldn't take all that long. It's the first component of the boat that I built -and I got it wrong. No biggie. Getting things a little wrong now and then is all part of building stuff. It's easy to not make mistakes. Just do nothing.

I actually made some progress on the side panels. Once the little transom problem is sorted out, I should be able to start assembling the components I've built. Looks like the rest of my work came out the way it was supposed to.

My lovely wife and I spent an awful long time tying to figure out what we are going to do about a dinghy for out other boat. So far we've gotten by just fine without one. Our Oday 19 only draws a foot of water with the keep retracted. On fresh water lakes, we bring it right up to shore. Down to Florida, the tides aren't all that big, so usually we just anchor within wading distance to shore. Places with high tides, mud bottoms, and cold water don't lend themselves to wading.

There was a roll up dinghy available at a local discount store. It was seriously price reduced. It took some research on-line to learn about it. Finally, I located some reviews, and they were all bad. A bargain isn't a bargain if the product is junk.

Plenty of people with small sailboats tow a dinghy. I'm not too keen on that, but it does solve the “where the heck do we store the dinghy” problem. There's no room on deck to stow a tender, so something that could be deflated and stored is tempting. I'm still thinking an inflatable double kayak would be ideal. It would work as a tender and be fun to paddle in the mangroves.

Of course, we could just spend money and stay at marinas all the time, but I'm allergic to spending money for nothing.

-Sixbears