Issue 21 : Nov/Dec 2001
At a friendly seaside town in Wales — the last place you’d expect to have problems — one of our oars disappeared from the dinghy while we were enjoying a walk ashore. It was a particularly annoying theft since, to the derision of many a fellow yachtie, we’ve always been scrupulous about locking our dinghy ashore no matter how respectable the area. Not that Siandra’s tender is especially smart or valuable (as one cruiser said to us: “Blimey, if I was going to nick a dinghy, I certainly wouldn’t choose yours!”) but it does the job, it fits the space between Siandra’s mast and doghouse, and it happens to be uninsured.
If someone did pinch it, they would cause us a great deal of expense and inconvenience, which seems a sufficiently good reason to throw a wire strop around the thwart and padlock it to a nearby railing (or whatever we can find). Our oarlocks are easily removed, so we never leave them in the dinghy, and the oars . . . well, we were working on an idea for those just as we sailed into a certain Welsh harbor.
Needless to say, we now have a device for securing them to the dinghy seat. It’s a simple T-piece, made by welding two lengths of 12-mm stainless-steel rod together, with the arms of the T bent 90 degrees to form a pair of tight-fitting “manacles.”
The tail of the T goes down between the oars through a 13-mm hole in the thwart, and a padlock fits through a hole drilled in the tail just under the thwart. The location of the padlock-hole determines how snug a fit the manacles will be: the tighter they hold the oars against the thwart, the less chance there is of someone wiggling them out; too tight, and you’ll have difficulty getting the padlock shaft through the hole.
While these precautions won’t stop a really determined thief, they’ll certainly deter a casual opportunist or a prankster. And most importantly (since unnecessary stress breaks the first rule of cruising!) they mean we never have to worry about the dinghy when we’re ashore, however questionable the area.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
