Ugly Americans (or how not to endear yourself to the natives), some fact checking, and Latitude 38 asks the 14% question...
Yep, the PT11 is as close to a perfect tender as I've come across but, the snag is, it is just that little bit too big to stow on my available deck space. If plans were available (they're not) I'd just scale them down a kiss but as they are not one needs to look elsewhere.
Which brings us to Danny Greene's Chameleon. Danny Greene has been designing and building nesting dinghies as long as I can remember and the Chameleon, while now a somewhat long-in-the-tooth plan is actually quite evolved. It does the job and rows, sails, and motors well. It's also stable enough to fly fish from and a 210 pound guy will have no issues pulling himself aboard from the water when needed. The problem for me with this dinghy is its nested space requirements is 5'4" X 4'2".
While nested length and width are crucial to stowage so is the nested height is just as important and the Chameleon comes in at twenty inches.
All in all a very nice design.
The B&B Spindrift S11-N is another nice design.which nests in a 5'7" X 4' 7" space and has a nested height of 24".
With a nested length of 5' 7" it is too long for my space and to be honest the 24" nested height is just too high and I really should have bought the S10-N design which is 5' 2" X 4' 3" with a nested height of 21 1/2 inches.
The Spindrifts sail well, row well, and motor well. Designed with more sail area than most nesting dinghies if sailing with some attitude is your thing you might want to check them out.
Another B&B design is the Two Paws 8 or 9 pram dinghies. The TP-8 nested size is 4'X 4' 1" and the TP-9 nested size is 4' 8" X 4' 4" with both having a nested height of 20". The Two Paws are a little less fiddly to build and, to my mind, a bit better suited to life as a tender.
More from the list later...
Listening to Robbery Inc
So it goes...
