Dinghy Dock Casualties

A few weeks back I posted about the horrible dinghy dock here at the Las Brisas anchorage.  Although much of that post was tongue in cheek it is possible I underestimated the nastiness of the situation.

A couple of days after that post I slipped on the dock.  I was not seriously hurt, but it could have been worse.  One of the steps on the stairs slopes down, and in bare feet I started sliding down the steps.  I tried to grab another step, anything, to stop my motion and could not.  At one point I was splayed out like Spiderman on a wall, sliding down towards the water as I scrambled for purchase.  Eventually I found it, fortunately before the water reached the pocket where my cell phone was.  When I was able to scramble to safety I was bleeding from about dozen cuts and scrapes from my knees to the bottom of my feet.  I took a picture, but I decided not to put it here.  Minor injuries and annoying, but with the dirtiness of the water here you have to make sure you clean everything well.  Nothing worse than having to wear socks for a day to two to keep things clean.

That wasn’t the big casualty.  The big casualty was the dinghy.

Last week I took a bus with Will to Costa Rica.  Will is off to do an internship with Robert Perry, and we booked his flight to the U.S. from Costa Rica as we were anticipating that we’d be there weeks ago.  Being stuck in Panama still meant we had to deal with a fifteen hour bus ride, and the number of buses is limited so I had to spend two nights in Costa Rica in order to make sure he got on the plane.  This left Kathy and Danielle in charge of the boat.

Their first day alone they decided to go into town to pick up a few things.  When Kathy pulled up to the dinghy dock there was a large local working boat tied to it, taking up about three quarters of the available dock space.  This forced her to tie up on the end of the dock, a spot we generally avoided because of the sharp, rusty corner of a girder that is exposed there.  At the time they parked the dinghy there were other dinghies directly alongside the dock and they were on the outside and far from the corner.  But by the time they arrived back from their errands many dinghies had come and gone, and ours was pressed up hard right into the nasty, rusty sharp corner.

It put several holes in the tube and shredded up the rub rail.  I suppose the rub rail was doing it’s job, we might well have had a huge tear instead of a few punctures had this hard rubber rim not been there.  The holes were large enough to deflate the front of the dinghy very quickly.  Kathy wasn’t sure how bad the damage was – it looked awful and cover and area over a foot long on the boat – so she was a bit nervous using it since it couldn’t hold air in the front half of the boat.  Kathy and Danielle spend the rest of their girls week together on the boat.

My bus from Costa Rica left at noon on Saturday and arrived at 3:00 AM on Sunday.  Sunday morning some cruisers had organized a “dinghy patch party” – we were not the first, second or third cruisers to have their dinghies badly damaged by this dock.  A knowledgeable cruiser was bringing supplies and know-how to show others how to fix up their boats.  Back when we had a soft bottomed dinghy I learned how to patch up holes, but it had been a while and misery loves company.  So we went even if I was still yawning at 10:00 in the morning after my late night arrival.

When I had a look at the damage in daylight it didn’t seem as bad.  I quickly spotted two punctures, unfortunately they were located near a trim strip which would make them trickier to patch.  But I was happy to see it was not a long tear like we thought.  I was able to patch them fairly quickly but you don’t know if it really works until the glue on the patches cures.

We’ve not fixed every leak, but it holds for a day or two.  I’m going to have to put in some more time tracking down the final slow leak but for now it works and we’ve still got other fish to fry.

What is disappointing is that this dinghy is only a year old, we bought it new last year in St. Martin and were looking for years of hassle free living with a nice new boat.  Usually patches and leaks and ugliness are afflictions of older boats nearing the end of their lives, not new boats.  Cruising 365 days a year puts a lot more wear and tear on things than using them on weekends in the summer, but this stay in Panama has put a couple of years on the dinghy.  The engine cowling has also been mauled by the dock more than once and is now seriously scratched up.

You can see the damaged rub rail, and the grey trim that made the patching more difficult since the patch could not lay flush to a single layer of hull.

The dinghy had a rough week.  While not directly related to the dock (though somewhat, as the rough edges on the metal are hard on dock lines), our painter had also chafed.  We were actively looking for some replacement line and couldn’t find it the day before it actually broke and the dinghy ended up on the rocks earlier in the week.  Of course it turned out that wasn’t actually as bad for it as a controlled stay tied to the dock.