Yellow

October 5th, 2005 by: cheyenne

Yes, we have a dinghy of sorts (see lovely stock photo below). It’s an 11-foot yellow inflatable kayak. We currently can view our wood floor or murky bay scuzz through the window. Clearly we need to get gone to more scenic parts.

clear blue hawaii inflatable kayak

Reasons we got this instead of a more conventional dinghy-style dinghy:
* We are radical, cutting-edge rockstars who will not be cowed by the color yellow, or practicality.
* It is maneuverable and easy to paddle/row (we’re not just about to plop a spare—ha ha—motor on the back of anything and go speeding off).
* It seats two persons (there are two of us; coincidence?) but can be converted to a one-person in the event that one of us is eaten by a shark.
* It folds down (being inflatable) and takes about five minutes to pump up.
* It has a very simple design (INGENIOUS!!): two removable pontoons inside of a seemingly sturdy Cordura sleeve; the bottom/edge is made from very tough nylon (840 denier nylon). It has a clear viewing panel in the bottom for fisk viewing made of 40 gg pvc.
* It has many places to lash/tie/strap/hook/rope things.

clear blue hawaii inflatable kayak

* It weighs 32 pounds.
* Our boat is 32 feet long.
* It’s a kayak and can be used for exploring!
* We may have already come up with a name for it. Besides “Yellowy.”
* It was relatively inexpensive and used dinghys on Craigslist were not forthcoming unless they were owned by freaks who did not answer your emails with actual information. We tried to look into buying a zodiac-type thing but the ad did not list dimensions or weight or anything useful and the guy would not tell us no matter how many times we rephrased the questions. Another that I really wanted was the cutest little orange jobber but the guy never answered me at all. Yellow = er…um; orange = good, pumpkin-like, tomato-like, CANDY-like.

Reasons I’m a little apprehensive:
* It’s freakin’ YELLOW. Newfangled looking.
* I worry about the proverbial kid with a bad attitude and a pocketknife.
* It will be a tight squeeze when provisioning for water or groceries
* We will have to make multiple trips if we have visitors.
* The Cordura part—the hull—is vivid yellow and screams out yellowness. There are irritating product names on it too (we’ll cover that).
* We’ll have to take care to protect the clear panels on the bottom; cover them when toting stuff around, etc.

So, we’ll see how it goes. Worst-case scenario is that it is not practical and we need to get a hard dinghy as well (but we’ll still have a kayak to play with and this isn’t a bad thing). Which puts us back at the which-dinghy-to-buy dilemma. The Porta-bote is cool and folds up small and is lightweight (heavier than this kayak) and a very real alternative; however, the max capacity is 445 pounds (the kayak is 500). It also seems expensive. We could instead buy a second kayak if we had visitors, or we could upgrade to the Soar, which has a freaking 1000 pound capacity and WINS. It is pricey (explains why we don’t have a Soar taking up the entire living room floor right this moment) and I wouldn’t be able to stop worrying about it getting stolen, slashed, eaten by a shark, getting scurvy…

In other, non-dinghy news, yesterday was spent provisioning non-perishables. I got looks from the other shoppers when I tossed 18 tins of dolmas onto my cart; I told them that I had spent the last 16 months in a secret assassin training facility and hadn’t shopped in a while. When I went to bed last night, I dreamed about Lara Bars.



One Comment on “Yellow”

  1. TimeMachine » 1.3-Year Porta-Bote and Kayak Review says:

    […] Dinghy #1 is the kayak, the inflatable two-person yellow kayak whose initial yellowness was so extreme that I was forced to squint my eyes and view the thing through the haze of my own eyelashes lest I damage the very cones of my retina and see nothing but purple the rest of my life. Joshua named it “Tigralita” after some tasty shrimp-like critters we used to eat in Barcelona, but we usually just call it The Kayak (or The Yellow). These days the kayak is not so yellow, rather, a pale misty cream dusted with sand and dotted with mud and cut with large swaths of silver-blue Cordura, which we use when we have to patch the thing. We’ve patched it now three times, the last patch basically replaced 50% of one entire side and it ripped out again the other day and needs yet another patch. Currently it is lying deflated and growing mildew in our port ama. […]

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Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell