I’ve just mailed in a deposit for a build-it-yourself fiberglass dinghy! The PT11 from Port Townsend Watercraft.

I first heard about this kit from a fellow cruiser while hanging out in Ensenada. At the time, I thought, “wow! cool! I’d love to do that.” But there’s just no place for a project like that on a cruising boat, so I figured no way it would ever happen. But when we decided to stay in the Bay Area, near home, for a few more months, a window of opportunity suddenly presented itself.

It’s a dream. But as with so many dreams, there are those who will question my sanity.

On the one hand, it’s the absolutely perfect dinghy for cruising on Gardyloo.

It’s 11′ long, making it large enough to comfortably ferry people and groceries between the boat and a dinghy dock or shore. Yet it’s only 90 lbs, so two people can handle it easily. And I plan to put wheels on it, so even one person alone can get it on and off the beach.

It’s a “nesting” dinghy, which means that it comes apart into two pieces, and one of the two fits inside the other. That means it will fit perfectly (a whole 2″ to spare) in the limited foredeck space we have under the staysail Hoyt boom. But it’s also tough enough to be towed, even in fairly rough conditions.

It’s designed to be so easy to row that you don’t need an engine. Which, assuming it proves to be true, means we can get rid of our electric outboard, which is neat itself, but requires storage, is one more thing to break, and consumes electricity from our limited supply.

And as an extra added bonus, it also works as a sailing dinghy, with a removable rudder, daggerboard, and 13 lb carbon fiber mast and sail. Certainly not a requirement for a cruising dinghy, but definitely a source of much potential fun.

On the other hand, it’s a do-it-yourself kit that’s estimated to require 200-300 hours of work to assemble (despite many prebuilt pieces). And I have no experience at all working with fiberglass and fairly little working with wood.

But there’s even an upside to that: It comes with a meticulous 280-page manual, that’s described in one review as being virtually a course in how to work with fiberglass. So I’ll finish the project knowing a lot more than I do now about fiberglass. Not a bad thing if you’re living on a fiberglass boat and depending on it to keep you safe and afloat.

I expect there will be more than one future post covering my progress with this project. Stay tuned.

People are always asking “how’s it going?” Or, in our case, “how’s the cruising life going for you?” There’s never a simple answer to that question, so I thought I’d recount a day recently when everything went. Sort of cover it all in one post.

We’d been at the Police Dock on Shelter Island in San Diego since arriving from Mexico, and it was time we went elsewhere. You’re only allowed two weeks time there, and our time was up.

Quite a number of boat bucks went into getting stuff added to the boat, all installed over the previous two weeks. (A “boat buck” is $1k, because nothing you done to a boat seems to cost less than that.) So another goal for the day was to try out the new equipment. It’s always important to try gear locally. Once you go on to another country, it’s hard to get the installers to come fix it.

We had planned to get up early and do a bunch of sailing, but a late dinner meant that plan went quickly out the window. By the time we were ready to head out, it was 10AM. Our goal was to be at our new marina by 3PM, since the office there closes at 4PM. But it wasn’t a hard-and-fast deadline, since the marina would leave the dock key hidden in the dock box for us.

Suzana nearly went nuts trying to find us a slip. San Diego these days is almost full up. You can find slips down in Chula Vista (south of San Diego and still on San Diego Bay), but that’s less convenient for shopping, dining, visiting downtown, and getting out to the ocean. She contacted everyone we knew with connections in San Diego — people who’d been at particular marinas for extended periods, so the marina would be more likely to try their best to find something. Finally, with the help of Diane from Celtic Song, whom we’d met on last year’s Ha-ha, we got a slip at Harbor Island West.

We went through our departure check-list, prep’d the new equipment for trial, and cast off from the dock, making a sharp turn into the wind. A turn which didn’t quite make it. So we did what’s known as a fairway rotation — going forward and back while turning. Unfortunately, the wind was pushing us toward the slips opposite us, containing one boat and two concrete pylons. We missed the boat (whew!), had some help from a good samaritan bystander avoiding one of the pylons, but hit the other pylon, making a rather scary scrunching noise.

With some more help from the bystander, we managed to get the boat pointed away from the dock, and went on out. Inspecting the damage, as we motored up and down the Bay, we found it wasn’t good — the rear pulpit was bent over a couple inches, causing the lifelines to sag in that area — but it wasn’t terrible — the boat was still sea-worthy and the damage stable. I should note for the non-sailors that the pulpit is made of 1″ stainless steel tubing, not something that bends easily.

It’s always a good idea to do a post-mortem on any accident, to figure out why it went down the way it did. In this case, we blame two factors: First, we had planned our departure assuming we’d get out at 8AM, when the wind is virtually nil; but we actually got our at 10AM, when it had picked up to 10-12 knots. We should have re-thought the departure to take the wind into account. Second, we’d attached our new auto-pilot rudder (more on that later), which reduced our ability to make tight turns. We should have waited until we’d left the dock to attach it.

So finally, having decided we didn’t need to return to dock for repairs, we went on out of the Bay. San Diego Bay is a very active waterway, especially on a Saturday morning, so there were dozens of others sail and power boats out with us, a huge cargo ship on its way inbound, and a “warship” (what they call all military vessels) on its way outbound. We stuck to the side of the channel to avoid the big guys (cargo ships can’t maneuver much to avoid you, and warships don’t have to avoid anyone unless they feel like it), and enjoyed the ride. Many of the other sailboats were sailing out, but we were running behind schedule, were not 100% clear about the angles between the wind and the channel, and were still a little shaken from our earlier adventure, so we motored.

Once outside the Bay, we went about getting the sails up. The wind was still in the 10 knot range, which is enough to keep us going, but not enough to really get up to speed. We put up the full main and jib.

Next, the poop went overboard. No, that isn’t a euphemism. Once you’re three miles offshore, it’s legal to dump your holding tank. This was one of the goals for the day. The actual process is this: Suzana stays in the cockpit and watches the lovely clouds. I go below, into the bowels of the boat, open the floorboards, reach in and twiddle the boat’s levers, which are long and hard and need a strong hand to manipulate into place. Then I switch on the vibrator — uh, I mean the macerator, which massages the holding tank contents and spews it into the ocean. Having done the dirty work, it was time for testing the new stuff.

The first piece of new equipment we went to try was the autopilot. We already had an electronic autopilot, but wanted a wind-driven one as well. We got a Hydrovane model, which was a good match for our boat. Wind vane autopilots have a wind vane (duh) sticking up in the air. You adjust the vane to the angle you want the wind relative to the boat. As the boat wanders from that angle, the vane is pushed over, which is mechanically translated to a shift in rudder angle, moving the boat back on course. They require no power and are very reliable. Why did we need a second autopilot, you ask? Four reasons: wind vane auto-pilots are more reliable than electronic ones; they draw zero power; we wanted redundancy, as life on a long passage with no autopilot is no fun at all; and this model can also act as an emergency rudder should your main rudder break. These are especially important features if you plan to go far away from civilization, like across the Pacific.

Up went the vane. A little fiddling and we locked the main rudder in place, leaving all the steering to the Hydrovane. And steer it did, keeping us exactly on course. We adjusted course using it, switching from upwind to downwind. Everything worked as expected on both points of sail. The real test will come on a longer passage, but so far, so good.

The next piece that went under test was the Watt & Sea hydro generator. This is a propeller on a shaft attached to the rear of the boat that you lower into the water. The propeller turns a generator that makes electricity. Gardyloo already has solar panels, but they don’t generate quite enough power for our needs, so we wanted a supplemental source. We considered more solar (no space), wind (too noisy), or a generator (yuck), but settled on the Watt & Sea. When sailing in areas where we frequent marinas (and shore power), it’s not needed, but it works extremely well for long passages like a Pacific crossing.

The final piece of equipment we went for was the water maker, or desalinator. We got a small Spectra model (150c) that only generates about 6 gallons an hour. Again, not so important around marinas, but really nice when crossing the ocean or in places where you have to dinghy water out to the boat in jerry cans. We set it to run for an hour, and it did its thing with no further supervision.

Having successfully tested all the new equipment, we decided it was time we went on to the new marina. Back up the channel and down the Bay, ready for a fresh encounter with a dock. We were assigned slip 362, which is a side tie that wasn’t in the original marina plan and was added on later, and thus doesn’t show on the map of the marina. It’s on the side of a series of slips pointed away from the marina. As those slips there are numbered 358, 359, 360, 361, from left to right, we figure 362 was on the right side. Wrong! Our first clue was as we approached and I noticed there were no cleats to tie the boat to. But dock we did, tying the boat temporarily to the cleats for the next slip. As we stood there scratching our heads, someone popped out from one of the other boats and said, “that’s not actually a slip, you know; the slip’s on the other side.” “Oh,” we cleverly replied.

Try two went a little better, though this time it was on the down-wind side, which is a bit more challenging. There were plenty of cleats. Once attached to the dock, I got off the boat to adjust the boat’s position, while Suzana stayed on the wheel. The adjustment process involved some heavy duty pulling and pushing from the dock — it’s a heavy boat, and the wind wasn’t helping.

That’s when I went overboard into the water between the dock and the boat next door. I was pulling Gardyloo in, but it turns out the line I was putting all my weight on wasn’t actually secured to the boat cleat — in retrospect, I recall attaching it temporarily over just one horn of the cleat while I dealt with other matters. Anyway, it gave, I went, splash. In more detail: oops; shock; blackness; oh, this is what they meant when they said they didn’t know which way was up; ah, there’s the dock; hey, my PFD actually went off like it’s supposed to; hmmm, not too hard to climb back up; damn, I’m soaked; good thing I left my wallet in the other pants; huh, Suzana looks concerned. (Suzana says, the sequence was more like: splash; he’s in the water; omg, I’m too far from the dock to get there; where is he???; boom? aah, the PFD; whew, his head’s out of the water; I can breath.)

Though completely wet, the water temperature was warm, so I went on to secure the boat lines before going below, taking a shower, and changing clothes.

So that was the day that everything went. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if things went well, went poorly, or just went sideways. But you have to admit that everything did went.