SV Kooky Dance: Dinghy Chaps

By Capt. Scott Buckley

Location: Boot Key Harbor.

We have two dinghy's on Kooky Dance. A ridged wooden rowing and sailing dinghy,

and an inflatable motor powered dinghy.

The inflatable is a PVC type inflatable and not the expensive hypalon type so is more susceptible to sun damage. One solution is to fit the inflatable with a protective cover that is secured to the dinghy so it does not become loose and go over the side and get fouled in the propeller. This sounds like an easy thing to do EXCEPT there are lots of protrusion and attachments to the hull and nothing us straight on the dinghy and you have to secure it to the top half of a tube.

I don’t think it would be possible to do while the dinghy is in the water so we had to decide where to work on it. One option would be to take the boat and sewing machine to the marina. Here at Marathon City Marina they have some indoor work spaces available to the cruisers free of charge. It would require taking the dinghy, supplies and sewing machine to shore. The other option would be to figure out how to do it on board. I favored the last option because I don’t know enough about what I am doing to not forget most of what I will need and would have spent most of my time rowing back and forth between the marina and the boat fetching various things.
I found enough room on the bow of SV Kooky Dance and put the dinghy there.

The first step was to layout a pattern out of scrim. Scrim is a light inexpensive plastic sheeting that is commonly used for making patterns.

The scrim was laid down on the hull in small segments and formed around the seems and contours of the hull tubes. The scrim is transparent so you can cut hole so the protrusions from the hull can poke thru and form darts in the scrim to form contours.

It was convenient to work on the boat so that test fits were easy and often.

We used various part around the boat to measure shapes. The beer in the picture is not canned confidence for the fabric cutter guy but the right size circle for the cut outs.