Sailing Vessel Karma

It can haul your headsail. It can haul your beer. It can commute you to your ferry in the wee hours of the morn. It can get you through big wind and small but mighty waves. It can haul up to two of your most acquainted acquaintances. It can also haul $ss behind a 5 hp outboard. This is our most well used, enduring method of transportation – the paddleboard. A gift from Liam last Christmas. Using it for fun and function, we’ve relied heavily on the paddleboard since moving aboard this April. Not having an outboard on the main dink for a good chunk of the summer, we often preferred a two person paddle to a row. This especially became true when the oar lock broke on dink 2.0.

Before I dive into Karma dinghy chronicles, here is where we have been with dinks. A Clark San Juan 23 (swing keel) named Nibbles was our previous vessel. It slept in the Duwamish River and ventured as far as Sucia in the San Juan Islands. Newbs to cruising, sailboats, all of it really, we did some research and found out that to get to shore, a crew needs a dink. So we pooled our money and invested $40 into the Explorer^TM 200. That plus some duct tape got ourselves, friends, firewood, and the pump to shore consistently for over a year. I like to imagine that the new owners of Nibbles still find joy in using it. I also like that I don’t have to deal with taking on water and deflating at the same time anymore.

Karma, however, did come with a dinghy. An 11′ massive hard dink, “the fridge.” It was lovely to row. On Cypress in particular we routinely rowed for hours.

Clunk dink clunk reeEEEECCcchh thud bam pop and the images that we conjured whilst trying to sleep were atrocious for a whole month of having it alongside Karma. Numerous attempts were made to get us some shut eye. Padding the boat with fenders seemed great until we were beam on to waves/wake. The boat would tilt, thus lifting the fenders up and opening a path for the dink to high five Karma. It was horrible. Some point we realized of course that hauling “the fridge” on deck at night was an obvious fix. However, it was attempted once and we have never really talked about it since. The set up below semi worked IF it was insanely calm but that’s not always and paired with the consistent ferry wake around the San Juans, this was not a robust solution.

Nothing worked consistently so while I was in Mexico, Liam did some market magic and set up a one swoop trick: snag an ~inflatable~ dink and drop off “the fridge” to a buyer immediately after. Yes Karma had two dinks at one point. The new guest onboard was to be a wood slat floor West Marine RU-260 able to hold 595 lbs with the transom supporting quote a 4hp lil motor. Karma trekked to Lummi Island where we offloaded the ((once) beloved) clunker and set off to Sucia. We slept extremely well and have heavily used this dink ever since.

Rowing was pretty efficient until the oar lock broke. Conveniently timed though, as we were thinking about getting an outboard. Wake boarding, trekking to far away places, and going fast were the enjoyed perks of one 4stroke, single cylinder Honda 5hp. Planing is possible if you are alone; I’ve reached up 11 knots. No need to fix that oar lock now. Outboard chronicles deserve a major focus later in posts. For this outboard’s story…long story short after my ferry to work was cancelled/delayed/cancelled, I tried to dink over to Shaw. I expected about 30 mins solo planing a big 2 nauti miles. After making it most of the way with lightening and rain as my companions, here is how that first outboard on the new dink ended:

I did not make it to work. I did start using the trusty paddleboard again (and procrastinate on fixing the oarlock…to this day). We eventually found and purchased another outboard thanks to the recognition of utility and kind sponsorship of Kate and Grant, Liam’s folks. We love our 2 stroke Yamaha and and we will write more about the outboards in detail…including the hotly discussed 2 stroke versus 4.

Dinks are derpy but quite fun and a huge part of the cruising lifestyle. A hard bottom (aluminum likely) dink is on the horizon but for now, we’ll continue using dink 2.0 to zip around the waters of Friday Harbor to visit friends.

Cheers!