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If you’ve never lived the cruising life, then you missed the social phenomenon of the dinghy dock. You see most big boats, like Tarwathie, can't sail up to shore. The water is too shallow there. We have to anchor off shore our out in the harbor somewhere. When we visited my brother Ed in Palm Bay, we coudn't get Tarwathie any closer than a half mile to shore. That's too far to swim.
The way we and other cruisers get to shore is with our dinghy. A dinghy is a small boat that we carry with us wherever we go. Tarwathie carries our dinghy up high on the deck when we sail. When we want to use it we have to lower it into the water. With the dinghy, we can row to shore.
The picture shows the dinghy dock at the Marathon City Marina. It looks crowded but on some days there are three times as many dinghies there. This marina, and other places charge money for permits to park your dinghy at the dock. Sometimes they get more money from that than for any other service for the boaters. In Marathon we had to pay $65 per month to use the dinghy dock.
When it is very crowded you have to double park or triple park your dinghy. When you do that you have to crawl over all the boats between you and the shore. Since many of them tend to be tippy and many have water on the floor, that’s an adventurous process. You risk dropping what you’re carrying or soiling your clothes, or worst case, of falling in the water.
When your boat is on the inside with other boats double or triple parked behind you, it’s a challenge to get out. You have to untie the painters on those other boats and move them out of your way. Then you need to reposition them and retie them. Boaters often do a bad job of retying and they drift away.
It would also be bad to have a brand new shiny dingy (or dink as sailors like to call them) because they get all banged up at the dinghy dock. It’s almost impossible to bring your boat in without smashing into others.
When people go away, like we went away for David’s graduation, they leave their dinghies at the dock. If there is a big rainstorm while they are gone their dinghy fills with water and sinks. Then one finds out just how nice or nasty the fellow boaters are. If they’re nice they will bail your dinghy so it doesn’t sink. If they’re nasty they just run over your sunken boat.
As you can see, dinks come in two varieties, soft (inflatable) and hard. Most have outboard motors but some (like ours) just have oars. A soft dinghy is almost impossible to row properly but they are very stable and almost immune to tipping. They also don’t scratch your sailboat if they run into the side. However, a lot of the soft dinks leak air, and you see the owners blowing them up to keep them from sinking.
Sometimes the police boats stop the dinghies and check them for required equipment: life jackets, horns, flares, lights (at night) and registration if they have a motor. Since many cruisers don’t have those things they get expensive tickets to pay.
The most amazing variety in dinks is the size. The cruisers in the harbor are more-or-less the same size, mostly 30-45 feet long, but the dinghies they bring to shore vary from 4 feet long to 20 feet long. I even saw one that was eight feet wide. I think some of these dinks are much too big to bring onboard your sailboat or to tow behind you. I suspect that people buy it locally then sell it to someone else when they leave.
The part I like best is to see the owner’s dogs riding to shore in the dinghy. Many of these poor dogs only get to go ashore and visit a fire hydrant once per day. When they do come they are very eager. You see them with their front feet up on the boat anticipating arrival. I can almost hear the thoughts in their heads, “I’m going ashore. I’m going ashore. Oh boy. Oh boy. I’m going ashore.” Once I even saw a cat doing the same thing. He was sitting precariously on the rail, seemingly fearless of falling in the water. That looked very un-cat-like, but otherwise, he was a perfect picture of dignity. Someday I’d like to make a video collection of these animals riding the dinks and submit it for the America’s Favorite Home Videos TV program.
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