Monday, September 21, 2009

New dingy: the learning curve has included...

Life is an adventure, and so, it turns out, is the addition of a dingy to our list of toys. The addition of a cover was an obvious choice, but supporting the center to make the water drain off was not trivial. The Admiral came up with a brilliant idea by putting a 4 foot diameter beach ball in the dingy. The ball supports the cover and drains most of the water off the sides. Other trials were not so successful. We tried lifting the dingy vertically using pulleys and long 2x4 lumber to simulate davits mounted on the fly bridge. This worked okay, but the limited mechanical advantage made this option undesirable... Another idea was to keep the dingy on a floating dingy dock when at our home marina. The basics of the floating dock are two 24x48x12 inch high polyethylene floats mounted under a 4ft by 8ft deck. The dock worked "okay" although if was a little "tippy". Ultimately, we abandoned further development work on the floating dock partly because the marina had recently banned such docks (even though they neglected to tell us...).

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Adventures in dingy launching & retrieving




The hypothesis is that if the dingy is easy to launch and retrieve that we will use it more. Toward that goal we have done a lot of experimenting. The latest advance is the addition of a winch that provides a significant mechanical advantage (about 14 to 1) for the retrieval process. We had initially tried a variety of pulleys with a mechanical advantage of only 5 to 1 that really made it difficult to retrieve the dingy. It turns out that launching is easy since gravity does all of the work...

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Our "favorite" passenger...


Taken June 13, 2009, this picture show the Admiral with granddaughter Sarah on Sarah's second trip aboard Lucky Us. We went out into Galveston Bay and anchored at Redfish Island where we had lunch and swam in the bay. All went well, except that we discovered that we had far too few inflatable water toys on board. Note: that (minor) problem has since been remedied...

Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Admiral in her brand new barge (aka dingy). Wait a minute... Where's the water? Where's the crew?