Imagine the situation. You are just about to set off on the great retirement cruise. You are loading the boat with everything you'll need for a long and adventurous summer spent exploring the Spanish Rias en route to the Med.
You decide that if you are going to be spending a lot of time at anchor, an upgrade to the dinghy is called for. You treat yourself to a nice new one: a Honda, with a V-shaped airdeck, which when inflated looks like a small RIB, with a raised prow to keep you nice and dry while motoring in a seaway.
Before you set off south you decide a shakedown cruise is essential, to check out all the systems. Off to a favourite local anchorage. Inflate the dinghy. Sea trials to the nearby waterside hostelry. Suitably impressed with the new tender, return to the yacht, turn on the heating (it's early April, after all), turn in for night.
Wake in morning, and, horror of horrors, the new dinghy has vanished. Has it been stolen? Did the knot come undone? No, the bowline is still secured to the pushpit. The polypropylene painter has not been cut, but burned through.
First thought: a dastardly thief who couldn't reach the knot used a cigarette lighter to liberate the dinghy. (The yacht has fairly high topsides, after all). Second thought: the remaining piece of rope reaches exactly to the exhaust outlet of the Eberspacher in the transom! Own goal!
So a frantic hunt ensues. Which way would the tide have been going at the point the rope parted? Has the dinghy already made it out to sea and set off into the wide blue? Has someone “salvaged” it?
After an agonising couple of hours of frantic motoring up and down, during which the quest seemed ever more hopeless, the fugitive inflatable was at last spotted, nestling safely - and unclaimed - on the river bank.
Now, how do you get it back aboard? The yacht draws too much to get anyway near it. But fortunately, among the “toys” they've already packed for the great adventure are a pair of inflatable canoes - “We saw them and we thought they might come in useful!”
So a canoe is inflated, paddled ashore, the new dinghy is rescued, and the panic is over. The investigation begins. They've had the boat four years, and being great fans of early and late season cruising (they always spend Christmas afloat) they have often run the Eberspacher with a dinghy astern, without this disaster befalling before. So why this time?
The skipper concludes that the higher prow of the new dinghy means the painter runs at a different angle, which might have been significant. Alternatively, it could be just one of those things: a particular combination of wind and tide that just chanced to put the rope across the exhaust outlet.
It must have been tempting to keep quiet about the whole potentially very embarrassing episode. But generously, he thought it would be better to confess, and recount the tale as widely as possible, to help fellow cruisers avoid suffer a similar experience.
He thinks perhaps the polypropylene painter of the new dinghy might have been particularly susceptible to heat - but points out that nearly all synthetic rope has a relatively low melting point.
So now he is looking out for a piece of Kevlar, which of course is fireproof. You can't buy it now, but a few years ago, (before it was supplanted by more user-friendly Dyneema) a lot of racing boats had Kevlar halyards.
So if anyone still has some spare Kevlar “string” hanging around at the back of the shed, my friend would love to know about it.
It seems there's a niche business opportunity waiting for anyone who can find old Kevlar halyards to recycle as heatproof dinghy painters for Eberspacher users!
