So… as promised, here’s our dinghy story… the condensed story. Click here for the WHOLE story
So, we have this fancy dinghy – a high-tech, carbon fiber model that is light to save weight …called the ASTender. Advertised as a more robust version of a typical RIB (rigid inflatable boat most cruisers have), it has been anything but! It is a German-made knockoff of a much better New Zealand dinghy called an OCTender. We should have bought one of those, but I digress.
However, the biggest issue was that the gelcoat was flaking badly. AST Yachts claimed owner negligence, saying we were supposed to rinse in fresh water and wax once a month to prevent UV damage. This is a completely unrealistic requirement for a cruising dinghy which lives most of its life in the sun and sea! Here are several pictures of the damage on different parts of the hull:
So what to do? Hmmm…. Apart from sending new handles and four beefier bulkheads, T Yachts refused to stand behind their poorly made product and would not pay for it to be fixed.
We really only had two choices:
- We could cut our losses and buy a new RIB. This would mean a lot more out-of-pocket costs and we would have to buy a new 15hp outboard, because the 10hp outboard that we have wouldn’t be strong enough to plane. It would also add about 60 pounds of weight, in the transom – not good for a performance catamaran.
- OR, I could spend a lot of time and effort to refinish the existing dinghy. In its current state, it was probably worth less than $1000 and would require hundreds of hours of labor and maybe $1500 of materials and tools to refinish. And that didn’t include figuring out the transportation to Colorado and back. Then, Would the finished product be any good? I was relying on YouTube to fill in my lack of experience in refinishing gelcoat. There was a 50-50 chance that I would screw it up and have to cut the dinghy into pieces with a circular saw – not a pleasant thought.
After much agonizing, we went with option 2. The unfinished basement area at home in Colorado would be a perfect workspace since it was heated in the winter. So the next challenge was to get it back to Colorado and the only good option was to rent an SUV with a roof rack and transport the dinghy on the roof. We got a Ford Explorer with the right sort of rails and built a 6’-long, square-section, using aluminum bars (courtesy of Home Depot) wrapped in foam pipe insulation, and tied to the rails using cheap tire tube for padding at each of the four contact points.
The next challenge was how to load the dinghy onto the roof…. We hoisted it up under Moxie, backed the car underneath and tied it down with webbing straps.
The trip back was mostly uneventful; the dinghy didn’t fly off and total any cars behind us – whew! However, we soon found out that the dinghy was too big for the narrow entrance to the basement stairs., nor were the basement windows. Sigh …
So instead of the work being done in the heated, unfinished basement, I would now have to do it in the unheated garage. I would also need a paint booth to contain all the dust and gelcoat overspray. But first I had to build a cradle to hold the dinghy. It had to be the right height to minimize back strain during sanding and sturdy enough that I could work on it for several months. And so started the first of dozens of trips to Home Depot.
The most time-consuming process of the whole project was preparing the hull and deck surfaces prior to spraying with gelcoat. The old flakey gelcoat had to be removed so that the new gelcoat would have a good surface to bond to. And so, the experiments began with different techniques …
The dinghy needed to be stripped of all hardware, foam fenders/decking, handles, rubber keel, drain plug, light attachment, oar locks, storage nets, bow cleat, bow eye, etc.
The next steps were to make a new fender, replace the fragile original foam padding, and add non-skid flooring.
It was a lot of work in the end, about 300 hours I guess and about $2000 in tools and equipment but I’m very happy with the results. The dinghy looks shiny and almost new again! Tada!
