I made a couple phone calls to Phoenix when I decided I needed to return from Kansas and was assured I had work upon arrival so I loaded up my stuff and my two dogs and headed west. I did fine, working one job 40 hours during the week and another on the weekends. It wasn’t but about 9 months when I got a call from the company I had retired from to say they needed someone to reorganize a department asking if I was interested. I would be “contract” this time but it meant I didn’t have to work the weekends to earn the same money. So I accepted the position. I moved house in another year or so from my old neighborhood in West Mesa to Central Phoenix and felt quite settled again. BUT….. I was starting to feel the itch to sail once again. I had plans (in my head) to retire again in about 7 years and to buy a 32 plus foot boat to live on. The 7 or so years seemed like a long time to wait to get back on the water so I decided to get a small dinghy to sail in the meantime. Something similar to a Walker Bay 10.
I found a 10’ dinghy on Craigslist that had originally been a yacht tender in San Diego and brought out to Phoenix to be used as a small fishing boat in the local lakes. Then a restaurant in Central Phoenix had bought it to decorate their patio. It had been out there for about 6 years and all the wood was gone from the sun but the hull was solid fiberglass and in excellent shape. Again, thinking I could restore it and make a sailing dinghy out of it, I bought it and hauled it home in the back of my 2005 GMC Envoy XUV (the one that has a retractable roof in the back).
It needed a trailer as it was just a bit too big to handle easily so I went to my old neighbor, whom I had given the trailer from the very first worthless catamaran, and he still had it in the back yard. Having done nothing with it, he gladly saw me haul it away. I ground it all down, painted it sparsely, put on lights and licensed it with the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT).
I stripped the boat down to the hull and started reading about fiberglass, intending to rebuild it entirely of glass. I purchased a 12 foot spinnaker pole (thinking it was a boom at the time) for a mast. I bought a main sail & jib all off of Craigslist. I was ready to rebuild. Winter came and went and then it was too hot to work outside here (115 degrees in the summer is not uncommon). So I moved it into my living room for a while. Well I am single and my dogs simply had no say in the matter.
In reading about boat repair, I found my way to dinghy cruising, which is camping out in small sailboats or dinghies with what is called a boom tent. This I thought was exactly the activity I had been looking for. I started to orientate myself in that direction. That plus the very small size of the dinghy I had (in my living room), just didn’t seem like the right fit. So I started looking for another boat that would better suit my purpose.
Enter stage left as they say, again on Craigslist, a Chrysler LS-16. The perfect fit.
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