Drilling holes in my new dinghy

What kind of a fool would drill three holes in the bottom of a perfectly good (dry) dinghy?  This one would. 

My big project since I got back to the boat has been first to buy a new dinghy and then to get it hanging securely on the davits on the back of Gray Hawk.  The first priority was to raise the davits.  I could likely have left them where they were but we would have run the risk that a big following sea could swamp the dinghy.  That would have been really messy.  My other goal with raising the dinghy was to get ready for the eventual installation of solar panels.  Today that whole plan finally came to a finish.

My new aluminum dinghy is light – that’s a good thing.  But in order to be light its built pretty light – that’s not such a good thing.  I had a very difficult time figuring out where I could attach to in order to safely lift it.  The transom is the obvious place to attach at the stern but the bow was more challenging.  Initially I thought I could just attach to the back of the bow towing eye and that is in fact what I did.  However when I did a trial lift it was obvious that lifting from the extreme ends of the boat wasn’t a good idea because my davits are not at the extreme edges of Gray Hawk. 

I couldn’t conveniently move the rear attachment point so I had to figure out some way to move the bow attachment.  I ended up drilling some holes at the bottom of the stem cap, putting a reinforcing plate on the outside and attaching a lift hook in the bottom of the inside, right where the bow turns up.  I goobered everything up with blue RTV and it appears to be water tight – time will tell.  Next weekend we’re taking the boat to the inner harbour in Victoria so that will be a good shakedown for the new dinghy mount. 

I’m still doing battle with the outboard but I think it is coming around.  Varnish is the enemy of all gas engines that sit for any length of time – its a big part of why I like diesels.  I’m hoping that is all I am dealing with on this one.  Yesterday I put injector cleaner in the tank and got it running long enough to ingest the cleaner.  Today it started easier and initially let fly a great cloud of smoke.  I think it ran better today but it still won’t idle.  I’ll give it a few more days of the cleaning treatment but if that doesn’t work that will be about the limit of my troubleshooting abilities so I’ll have to find a local small engine guru. 

And now for something completely different. 

This guy lives a few slips away from us.  He exercises on the dock using three sticks.  He kind of bats the third stick with a stick in each hand and does all sorts of tricks with it. 

I told him all he needs is a tame monkey with a begging cup and he’d be right at home in the Inner Harbour in Victoria.  Come to think of it, Barry lives right across the dock from him so the tame monkey thing is handled too.