Boat Boys

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Brady's Dingy Survey

Some people in Key West, like us, live on their boats.  They anchor out in an area close to the harbor. 

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.  

Our dinghy.

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

Brady driving the family car.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Something Fishy

 Something Fishy today....
Jamie's drawing of a Dog Snapper, and Brady's real live catch, a Cero Mackerel.

Life in a Boat Yard - by Brady

Life in a boat yard can be difficult or fun but sometimes it’s miserable!  Like when it is 90 degrees and extremely humid while you are breaking your back, sweating in the engine room.  But it all pays off when you get to go and see awesome and new places.  Now it’s not that miserable.  Now it’s perfect and sunny , but the mosquitos are the biggest problem and we put on bug spray to stop them and that seems to work.  

Lots of people wonder how we work on the boat out of the water.  Well I will tell you.  There is a huge machine called a travel-lift that lifts up boats and puts them on wooden blocks.  The boat is kept from falling over  with metal stands.  Here is a picture of some boat stands.  

 We took our boat out of the water because we need to work on a couple of jobs, like taking off the propeller because it needed to be worked on.  We also need to paint the bottom with bottom paint.  Bottom paint is a special kind of paint that keeps barnacles and other stuff from growing on the bottom of our boat.  

Saturday, January 5, 2013

My Cardboard and Duct Tape Boat

My Cardboard and Duct Tape Boat 

Today I woke up and started to make a cardboard and duct tape boat.  First I made a cardboard frame of the boat, then I covered the boat completely with duct tape in the inside and the outside. Then I made a rudder completely out of duct tape.  NO CARDBOARD.  Next I found some chopsticks, and a rag and I used that for a mast and a sail. Then I taped the end of the sail to the bow.  Then I was done.  Then I took it out in the water and I put it in the water and then it floated.  I sailed the boat for about 20 minutes.  Then I went back to my boat Points Beyond.  I felt proud.

 By Jamie, age 7

7

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MY MOM AND DAD SHARING THEIR ADVENTURES WITH ME AND MY BROTHER:
Buying a boat.  Sailing it in the San Fran Bay.  Going cruising.  Taking me and my brother to the boat.
Sharing the same adventure they had.

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"Mom-Beard" - Jamie, age 6

After the BP Gulf oil spill - by Jamie

Pirate Penguin - by Jamie

Sailboat watercolor - by Jamie, age 6