The first was something I had picked up in Rhode Island, a little tub of a watercraft with fold-down plastic wheels attached to the transom so it might be rolled around, wheelbarrow-like, on land. I used it for a season as a tender for my larger sailboat. Then, around the end of October, I arrived one day at the dock to discover that it was no longer tied to the stern. It had not sunk, nor had the line from a deck cleat to its bow parted. “Whatever,” I thought, not having cared much for the thing anyway.
Needing another dinghy, I dragged a crusty older one that had been my mother’s and stepfather’s out of the dune grass and set about getting it functional. I did not touch the blue-painted interior, but fiberglassed cracks here and there and painted the bottom. I got it registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles, bought a two-horsepower motor, and applied the hull numbers.
The new dinghy spent a winter upside down on a dock in Connecticut but did not survive the next one here. Around Thanksgiving, it disappeared, too. Fool me twice, yeah, yeah, yeah. At least by then, I had the motor off the boat and stored in the barn.
Getting ready for this season, I obtained yet another dinghy, this time from a friendly young father in Connecticut whose sister had lost patience with it sitting amid a pile of leaves in her backyard. Unlike the ones that came and went before it, this was in good shape, except for a spot on the keel that I patched with fiberglass and epoxy.
This year, though it seems wrong in some cosmic sense, I guess I’ll have to get a padlock and a chain.