DITCHING THE INFLATABLE
To start at the very end: this is my little two-part nesting dinghy, ‘Punga’, sized and built to be the new tender to my 40-foot sailing yacht Local Talent. It is a Spindrift 10, 3.1m long and plenty big enough for two to four people, made from a design by B&B Yacht Design in North Carolina, USA. I built it in an old boat shed just up the hill from the Town Basin Marina, in my home port of Whangarei. It rows beautifully when distances are not so great, and can go farther afield under sail or motor. However, its seagoing options have also most definitely been exploited for nothing more than fun at times.
Discovering solutions
One of the chief beauties of making things myself is making them unique. This can be as a result of finding a good way to get around a problem with limited resources, simply through making creative choices about what to use or how to use it, or inventing new solutions altogether. Punga is no exception to this, and has many little quirks, the most admired of which has been its fishy interior.
When I was toying with different boat design solutions that would make storing it on our sailing yacht work, I considered making a one-part dinghy with clear panels in the hull to allow light to come through when it was stored upside down over the light-giving forward hatch — meaning that,
