When you are sail cruising, there are many vital tools
essential to the experience: a spare
GPS; a good Swiss Army Knife; a hand held radio, just to name a few. But no
tool is more essential than the dinghy.
The places that we cruisers go almost
never involve marinas. Aside from the fact that they are far and few between, and that while there you may procure more fuel and water for your boat, your boat
in a dock is basically a box with
no breeze and the smell of diesel wafting in. So we opt for the coves and the
anchorages and the small unpopulated harbors. These places look beautiful from
the boat, but you will never touch that white sand beneath those swaying palms but for the dinghy. In the
Caribbean, on small boats you typically
tow your dinghy. It bounces along behind you like a faithful puppy. You arrive
in your cove, you drop anchor, secure the boat, and hop into the dinghy with
its little 4 or 5 horsepower outboard, and a few putter putters later you are at another tropical bar/ grill made
out of sticks by some local who is happy to see you and happier still to sell
you a roti ( a Caribbean chicken curry
burrito) and a beer. Then you can hike into the hills and see what mysteries loom beyond.
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| food shack on Princess Diana beach, Barbuda |
If the dinghy breaks you are a prisoner of the boat. Oh sure, you
could row it, but that gets old, particularly if shore is a quarter mile away. Remember, it’s
hot, and you have been at sea, and you just want firm footing and a cold one.
What if you fell out of your dinghy? What if someone else wanted your dinghy? Bad
day either way. Ergo the deadman key: A plastic prong at the business end of a red rubberized wristlet. It must be
clicked into the outboard for it to run. Forget the deadman key, and you are delayed.
Lose the deadman key, you are screwed. Die and fall off the dinghy, well, at least the dinghy won’t get far.
Which is why we are vigilant about the deadman key. The
protocol: tie up the dinghy, hand over the deadman key to the crewmate who is responsible for sticking it into the
dinghy bag, which goes with you wherever you travel. (More on the dinghy bag
later. There is a lot to dinghy-ism).
Moral: always know where lies the deadman key. At sea, it is
the key that unlocks your world.
P.S. So as not to create confusion with an earlier post:
P.S. So as not to create confusion with an earlier post:
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| Deadman Key |
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| Deadman Cay |
