Some people in Key West, like us, live on their boats. They anchor out in an area close to the harbor.
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| One of those little white dots in the distance is our boat at anchor. |
Once you have an anchor set you do not want to pull it up every day to go into shore because there is not enough room in the harbor for everyone to take their boats in to shore every day, and it is too much work to pull up the re-set the anchor everyday. So, you use a smaller boat called a dingy to go to and from port. A dingy is a small boat that can be powered three different ways: with an engine, with oars or with sails. An outboard is an engine with a throttle and a propeller. There are different kinds of dinghies. Some are are inflatables, and some are hard dinghies. An inflatable is a dingy that is filled with air, and is made out of rubber fabric. Hard dinghies are made of wood or fiberglass. Our dingy is a Boston Whaler, made out of foam and fiberglass, with a 15 horsepower Yamaha outboard engine.
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| Our dinghy. |
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| Key West Bight dinghy dock. |
There are a lot of dinghies (and outboards) at the dingy dock, so I decided to do a survey on all the different brands of outboards at the Key West Bight dinghy dock. There were 57 dinghies at the dingy dock on March 20, 2013. They did not all have outboards, four were row boats. I found that there were 18 Yamaha, 12 Mercury, 8 Tohatsu, 4 Nissan, 2 Honda, 2 Mariner, 2 Johnson and 1 Suzuki. There were 4 unknown engines that did not have names on them. There were also 4 row boats.
I made a bar graph and a pie chart of my results. Here it is:
Now you know that our dingy is like our family car. And sometimes I get to drive it!
By: Brady, age 11
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| Brady driving the family car. |
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