Tender Love and Care
As a young man, I crewed aboard charter sailboats in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. One day, while I was loafing on the dock, a deflated Zodiac inflatable drifted under my perch. It looked like a rubber dishrag, and was covered with grass, slime and not a few barnacles. I let it pass, but the guys a few slips down didn’t. They retrieved it, cleaned it, removed most of the barnacles and pumped it up. And you know what? It held air and carried them all around Charlotte Amalie harbor for months.
Inflatables and their cousins, RIBs (Rigid Inflatable Boats), look pudgy, but they can take a heck of a lot of abuse, and most of them do: Inflatable tenders are bounced against barnacled pilings, dragged onto rocky beaches, jammed into a gaggle of other tenders at dinghy docks, flung around at the hands of reckless kids, overloaded with crew and supplies, capsized while being towed and filled with soapy water to wash clothes
