Love Me Tender

Though this whole boat-hunting process, our prayer has been that God would give us favor with the right people. We read somewhere that people buy and sell with money, but God's currency is favor. So each time we make a phone call to a seller, boatyard, or insurance company, or get in the car to look at a part, we pray for God's favor.

Since we purchased Grace we have been looking for a tender for her. We wanted a Fatty Knees/Trinka type of boat but were considering getting a Sabot because they are readily available. We had been haunting craigslist without much success. We did find one dinghy of the type that we wanted, but it was in really rough shape complete with thru-hulls, the kind that are made by rocks and don't have sea-cocks.

Then late Thursday night (or early Friday morning), we found an ad that looked promising. A short phone call and we were off to Paramount to have a look at her.

 The hull is lapstrake fiberglass like what we wanted and at 7'11 1/2" LOA she fits the bill exactly for a tender that can be sailed but that doesn't require registration in California.

 The bad news is that she has led a hard life and will need a fair amount of work. Her thwarts, dagger-board trunk, seats, and mast step had all been removed.  Someone decided she would look better with asymmetric gunwales and appears to have used a grinder to achieve their vision. We will be restoring her most of the way pretty soon and all the way as time and funds allow. Corrie informed me (and I agree) that she needs teak seats and rails as well as a new name. We had wanted to name our dinghy Dúlamán Maorach, Irish for "upstart seaweed", but somehow we thought that Favor would be a better name for Grace's tender, as God has definitely granted us favor through the whole process of Going Afloat.

Corrie and I really like Favor but Roo absolutely loves her.

As a short side note we finished repainting the stove for Grace and, Lord willing, will be finishing the last few repairs on it and converting it from CNG to LPG in the near future. Ohh yeah..... it looks great. We're still deciding whether or not to do gold pinstriping over the black paint. Stay tuned, all four Going Afloat readers!