Our Dinghy Adventures

I am going to start another blog to cover our adventures in our dinghy. I'll keep it here. I don't know how practical it is to keep two of these things going, but the Log of the s/v Clarity is for the boat that we plan on sailing out of Portland with someday and I started this blog to track our progress to that end. I'll keep up with that progress here and chart our dinghy learning curve at Love and Coconuts.

Where did the name come from? Look back through these old posts and you'll see where love and coconuts came from.

In the search to satisfy our dinghy longings, we looked around at a few boats and debated how much time and effort we wanted to put into restoration, versus buying something that we could sail away in tomorrow. I looked at a Lido 14 on Sunday, but it had a few issues, including a need for new hardware and fabrication to get the tiller back in place. On the way home I stopped by the local yacht dealer to see the new big boats just arriving. They have a couple dozen big cruisers in the water, and a handful of trailerable boats in the parking lot.

This day I saw a newly arrived Hunter 170, very clean and they hadn't even put up signage. It also hadn''t appear in their brokerage list yet, so I had to track somebody down and find out the details. I went looking for somebody on the docks and took the girls along to also look at boats. We were down there for about ten minutes before my 5 y/o fell in the river trying to step across to the transom of a Hunter 38.

They are both very polite and the 7 y/o had asked "Permission to go aboard, sir." Unfortunately, sibling rivalry took over at that point and in the mad dash to be onboard ahead of one another, the younger mis-judged the gap and went in feet first.

I was able to fish her out pretty quickly, since she had on her super-floaty lifejacket and was armlength's away from me when she went in. We dried her off with some towels borrowed from a passerby and had to head home early.

I called back and got the scoop on the boat. Went and looked at her this morning with the broker. Took Kris over there to look at lunch and then made an offer, it got accepted and the check is now on the way from the bank. I'm expecting to swap the money for the title on Thursday/Friday. Here she is, sporting fall colors just off Tomahawk Island Drive on Hayden Island.

The 170 is an all plastic boat with a self-furling foresail and a nicely roached main. This one is in excellent condition. The previous owner bought her new in 2000 and has only sailed her about 20 hours, while storing her indoors. The sail covers are still a shiny dark Hunter blue and the sails are very crip.

The only thing I plan on doing right away is adding a boom kicker to save everyone's heads. Don't want to lose any crew to a head injury before they get a chance to give it up for some other reason, like having to sail in rain all the time.

Woohoo!