Texas produce is now off my menu, a must read, and in the “arbitrary and capricious” department…
Since I’m working on motors today and I can’t think of anything that needs saying, here’s a post from the Boat Bits wayback machine. Posted in April 2011…
Thinking old school…
I’ve been looking at my deck a lot, trying to sort out just how much room I have for the next dinghy with no small amount of banging head against my hard dodger in the process.
I do happen to have a very (shall I say it?) “cunning” plan for the next, next dinghy. But, for the moment, I need something to replace the devil-spawned Caribe that, by its very existence, offends the natural balance…
As always when I find myself with a problematic nautical issue, I start leafing through the works of Phil Bolger. Phil always seems to shine a light on what’s needful without any of the BS that is modern consumer yachting. Five minutes thumbing through “Boats With an Open Mind” and hey presto… No more problem!
Can you spell T-O-R-T-O-I-S-E?
Back when we built the first Loose Moose, we also built one of Phil’s Tortoise designs. It was to be a temporary boat till we could afford a “proper” inflatable or build something nicer. The thing is, the Tortoise worked out so well that we never did build another dinghy. In Paris, we had a Bateaux Mouche pass us under a bridge by Notre Dame. Our towed Tortoise was destroyed in the process. No problem, we simply built another. That dinghy stayed with us when we built and moved on to Loose Moose 2. It was our dinghy throughout the Med, Africa and crossed with us to the Caribbean. Later, during Tropical Storm Hortense our much traveled Tortoise was destroyed. As it happens, not too far from the spot where we were to lose Loose Moose 2 a few years later in St Thomas…
So you see, we have some serious history with the Tortoise design…
Not everyone “gets” the real beauty of the Tortoise design because it is not as pretty as Phil’s Nymph design. The Nymph takes the same amount of plywood, but it trades pretty looks and nice lines for something just way too practical and compact to make sense for most folk to get excited about.
At 6’5″ long and a beam just a kiss over a yard, it is surprisingly roomy. It has space akin to our current excrementous Caribe rollup. The Tortois rows well and is light enough for one person to pick up and launch overboard unaided. Sort of makes sense…
The late, great “Dynamite” Payson tells you all you need to know about building one in his book “Build the New Instant Boats“. That, along with a couple of sheets of plywood, some glue, glass, resin of choice, and a couple of days to put it together, is all it takes and voilà, you have a dinghy.
As it happens, William Atkin had a design long the same lines called the Tiny Ripple. Sort of a cool, dinghy lifeboat. While the design is certainly worth considering, I think the Tortoise is the better of the two. That said, there are some details in the Tiny Ripple well worth borrowing when you build your Tortoise…
