Posted by Mike Field on January 24, 2015 at 12:48:35 user mikefield.
In Reply to: Re: Inspirations for Ransome's Characters posted by Magnus Smith on January 20, 2015 at 23:00:40:
Early dinghies often had wooden centreboards (albeit sometimes but not always weighted with a bit of lead), but I can't recall any evidence of what material Amazon's was made from.
My Aileen Louisa's was certainly steel though. And she had no built-in flotation -- rather the reverse, and if I was single-handing as I usually did, I carried some sandbags as ballast under the burden-boards. So I had to be careful when sailing her not to swamp her or she'd go down.
If you do lose the boat and she's still floating , then the rule about staying with her is certainly valid -- a floating hull has a chance of being spotted, even in broken water, whereas a person's head has almost none. So if you have a crew and someone has the misfortune of going overboard, another rule is to have someone always keep his eye on the man o/b absolutely all the time until the boat can get back to pick him up.
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