T&T: Dinghy

[Faure, Marin]

>That means you can not tie them up to the side of your boat and ignore
them for half a day until you want to use it again. It will ding up your
boat's gelcoat or paint job in a hurry.

Never had this problem in almost nine years of using a harshell dinghy.
Most of them, including ours, have a big rubber rubstrip around the
gunwale and this prevents any damage to the boat they're next to.  We
rarely have to tie ours up to our boat anyway as when we come back we
simply clip it into the Weaver davits on the swim step where it happily
bobs up and down until we use it again.  And if one does manage to
acquire a harshell dinghy without a rubber rubstrip, a couple of fenders
hung from the side of the boat solves the problem.  Either way, it's a
no-brainer tradeoff for the long-term downside of having a very
expensive item with a relatively short and eventually trouble-prone life
(as you can tell, I think fabric air-filled boats are the biggest waste
of time and money on the planet unless you actually need to deflate them
for storage, in which case they're a great idea).

______________________________
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, Washington