Davits on a CD36

[Michael Ellis]

We purchased an eight foot Zodiac and it does fit between the mast and the main sheet traveler. Just barely. However, even at just 73 pounds it is a pain hoisting it to get it off the boat and to retrieve it. So I am looking at the stern of my Robinhood 36 and trying to visualize if davits could work. Does anyone aware of a CD 36 with davits?

[wikakaru]

Sorry, this doesn't exactly answer your question, but here's an alternative:

We used to have a Bauer 10 dinghy that weighed north of 130 pounds. We lifted it easily using a halyard and winch, and stored it on deck. In places where dinghy/outboard theft was common and we wanted the dinghy out of the water just for overnight, we used to just lift it up a few feet with a halyard and tie it amidships, with fenders in place between the dinghy and mothership so it wouldn't rub.

I don't know if your zodiac is a RIB or a fully inflatable, but if it's the latter, deflating it and stowing it below (or at least somewhere on deck) is far preferable on a long passage to having a boat suspended in davits. It keeps the center of gravity lower, the windage lower, and the beauty of the boat higher. Also, you can't really fit a wind vane on a boat that has a dinghy on davits, should you want to do so. I'm assuming you will want to take the boat offshore. For coastal cruising, you might want to consider that adding davits will increase marina costs, because most marinas charge by the foot, and the dinghy sticking out there counts as footage.

The CD36 has fairly long overhangs, so you are suspending all that weight far abaft and above the load waterline. It would also be a bit difficult to hook the dinghy to the davits then climb onto the mothership over the transom. More modern designs where the waterline comes right to the transom and where there is a stern boarding platform are more conducive to davits than the CD36.

Just something to think about.

Smooth sailing,

Jim

[John Stone]

I'm the last guy to tell another sailor what to do. So I won't. But, for what it's worth I agree with Jim for every reason he lists.

Solving the dinghy conundrum is not easy. There is no perfect solution. I get why so many people like inflatables. They are stable and fast. In the water they are great.

On our first trip to the Virgin Islands I carried our much loved 9' Fatty Knees hard dinghy inverted on the cabin top, which when possible is the only place a dinghy should be carried. I also carried a 9.5' inflatable with a 9.8 HP two stroke. The inflatable was a gift to my 16 year old twins. They didn't get a car--they got a boat, so to speak. We used the inflatable a lot. But as you discovered it was a PITA to launch and recover. The outboard was noisy. I hated it. When I sailed home I sold it. My next trip to the VI I carried only the Fatty Knees. Amidships as before. Best decision I ever made. Easy to launch and recover, even by myself. Pull it up along side at night just as Jim described. Easy to row--miles of rowing every day. I carry a sailing rig too. Have a blast with it and use it for the long trips. When you row people on boats call out to you. You can chat from the hard dink. Always getting invited aboard boats and all because aI was rowing a hard dinghy. I made tons of friends because I rowing instead of zipping through the anchorage. It's a very sociable way to move through an anchorage. Inflatable are irritating and anti social. You are moving too fast to stop and chat. They go screaming past in the middle of the night.

If I had a inflatable I would probably want davits for costal sailing but off shore I would stow it on the deck and lashed down or rolled up and stowed below. You'll lose a lot of space. But as Jim said there are a lot of compromises. Getting an outboard off and on it is difficult. Especially in a chop. You'll probably need a tower with hoist. Very hard to use it with a windvane. I don't have a stern pulpit on my CD 36. It is open so easy for us to come over the stern. My preferred way in fact.

Anyway if I had davits I'd want removable ones. Good davits are going to be expensive. I used to have a nice pair I saw in the Caribbean on a J 40 bookmarked. I'll see if I can locate them.

A better solution though would be to consider a hard dinghy made by Ocean Cruising Tenders. Out of NZ. https://octenders.co.nz/. Keep in mind the price is in NZ dollars. Exchange rate was very favorable to US last year. They have a 8.5' hard dinghy that will take up to a 8 HP outboard. It planes. It's fast. It's light. Very cool. It's what I might consider if anything ever happened to our Fatty Knees.

[Michael Ellis]

John, your reply made me laugh. To a large degree you are preaching to the choir. I have two Minto's (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minto_Sailing_Dinghy). One is a Ranger I have had for about 40 years and one is a Rich Passage, which I built when I owned that company. Similar to the Fatty Knees, but probably a little more tender since the Minto doesn't carry its beam to aft as much as the FK. I succumbed to the RIB idea due to the fact an 8 foot RIB will fit between the mast and the main sheet traveler and a 9 foot Minto won't, plus at 73 the stability of a RIB does have some advantages. But they don't row, and they definitely don't sail. By the way, it was commonly understood a Minto could handle a 2 hp outboard, but since I never had a 2 hp outboard I never tried it. In addition to the RIB I purchased a 2.3 hp Honda so I put it on one of my Minto's yesterday and boy did it zip through the water. Much faster than the RIB. Noisy, but fast.

[John Stone]

Great photo. I relocated my traveler from the cabin top to the bridge deck. I like it there much better. More leverage. I don't need a mainsail winch. Less stress on the boom. Better sail control. But it also restricts movement in the cockpit. Compromises.

But one thing it did was allow the 9' FN to fit on the cabin top. I wasn't given that boat up. I have had it for almost 20 years. I was forced into borrowing a 2HP Honda which I replaced later with a 2 HP two stroke Nisan outboard last trip down. You can read about the circumstances here. https://farreachvoyages.net/2019/01/21/ ... #more-1369 It pushes the boat along faster than I need. Easy enough to store.

But an 8' hard dink will fit between the mast snd stock cabin top traveler on the CD 36. You can't use a rigid vang though. I use a vang/preventer to the side deck. Works very well.

Dinghies on boats under 40' are always going to force some compromises. We all have to figure out what works best for us given our needs and priorities. Met a guy in the Caribbean last time. Had a PS 37. He and his wife had sailed it all over the world. He had an 11' nesting dinghy. It worked perfectly for him. Like me he just rowed wherever he went. Had a small 2-3 hp outboard. Very cool set up.

Picture below.

[ric14854]

PXL_20210812_214922729.jpg

I installed Martek 370 Davits this summer to handle our West Marine inflatable.
Works pretty good, but the stern is very narrow on the C36 so a bit of a compromise.
I had to shorten the stabilizing strut 6 inches as the spacing is less than the provisions
of the standard strut.

Martek designed a bracket to support the bottom of the davit from the stern toe rail, and then
it clamps to the upper rail of the stern pulpit. I changed out the brace to a stainless steel tube
but the picture is an aluminum tube from Menards as we were heading out on a trip and needed
the dinghy. Our dinghy is a small West Marine PRU-3 8' rollup with a 2.5 hp Lehr propane engine.
53 lbs on dinghy and 37 lbs on engine.

I also had to brace the stern rail as mine isn't stiff enough for the motor side of the dinghy.

Here is their website: https://martekdavits.com/product/martek ... it-system/

The picture is just after mounting it and before I straightened everything up, but all that I have.

[Michael Ellis]

Thanks for your input. Since mos of our sailing will be in coastal waters I think we are going to stick to towing our dinghy until another approach is warranted.

You certainly have a lot going on back there. It looks like your radar mount is attached to the back stay. Is that correct? I also see the strut you added to strengthen the stern pulpit rail. As you can see the stern of the earlier CD 36 and the Robinhood 36 are a little different. The cockpit of the R 36 extends further back and the deck space behind the cockpit is less. A different strut length and angle would probably be required. What convinced you the strut was necessary. Intuitively it looks like a good idea.

Mike

[jen1722terry]

We're the outlier in this thread. We have davits on our little CD 31. It had them when we bought the boat in '13.

For us, davits were a selling point. We have health issues that preclude wrestling a heavy dingy. We're full time live aboards all summer and only coastal cruisers.

The davits also have a solar panel installed. To minimize the affect of the overhanging weight on the stern, we use a small Achilles air-floor model, weight 37 lbs with the little Honda 2.3 motor -about 70 lbs total. Adding 90 feet of 5/16 anchor chain forward seemed to trim the boat fore and aft pretty well.

Ugly? Sort of. Compromising performance? Likely, but not that we've noticed. Hard to board from the dighy after hooking up to the fall blocks? Sort of - you need some upper body strength - but doable, though who knows when I'm 80?

With such a small dinghy, we'd worry about the dink capsizing while towed and drowning the motor. Having the dink on the davits also makes it harder to steal (I had one stolen in St. Michaels harbor right in front of the Crab House back in '87).

They work for us but, generally, a 31 is too small for davits.

Y'all have a nice Thanksgiving.