Delilah's Meanderings

Quick update … it has been too long since our last update. We are still at Fort Myers Beach, but now tied to mooring ball #41. Which is very close to Salty Sam’s Marina in case you know the area. There was short trip to Naples, but we will go into more details in a future blog post.

To fill in until Kim has time to post, I will give a “dinghy” update. Dinghies are small boats used to get to and from shore from their anchored/moored big boat. Most cruisers have inflatable dinghies while others have hard. There are so many jokes waiting to be said here, but I will refrain. Recently our cheap PVC inflatable dinghy started splitting at the seams and leaking air. I found the repair kit, but the tube of glue was shriveled and hard as a rock. The instructions said if the seams fail send it back to the factory … not the best news. We first tried using super glue, but that didn’t work. We had some luck with a 3M product called 4200, but it only slowed down the leak.

Next we went through a denial period. The old dinghy can make it through the end of the season. We will just take the pump with us wherever we go and pump her up as needed. After a few days of this, I started researching our next dinghy options on the internet. Ouch … nice inflatable dinghies are expensive! I looked at hard dinghies because those don’t leak, but found that they are too big and too heavy to hold the same amount of people/weight … plus the Admiral requested an inflatable. I could not find an acceptable used dinghy in the area.

Long story a little shorter, we rented a pickup truck from Enterprise drove to Inflatable Boats of Florida in Naples and bought a new Inmar inflatable dinghy with a hard aluminum bottom. Our old dinghy had a soft bottom with slats …seriously … you can’t make this stuff up!!! :) Anyway … they did not have the 9 foot dinghy we wanted at Naples, but did at the Miami store. We had the truck and were anxious to get the new dinghy, so off to Miami we drove. But first a stop at Fort Lauderdale to drop off a new Honda 9.9 outboard engine so the salesman didn’t have to run there and back … we are going that way anyway with an empty truck. The traffic was terrible in Miami and we had trouble getting back on 75, but finally made it back to Fort Myers Beach.

We love our new dinghy … what a difference! Now if we only had a 6hp and not a 2.5ph outboard. It never ends!

Fair Winds,
Mark