Christmas came early this year by a day and a half. With the help of my friend Tom, we were able to complete the final phase of the swim platform, aft deck ladder, and dinghy saga. It has indeed been an epic journey from start to finish. Over a year ago, we discovered that our swim platform would not support the weight of a dinghy due to the rotting away of the wood beneath the fiberglass. Thus a plan was developed to replace the swim platform during haul-out at Pitman’s in 2017 in preparation for the The Great Loop trip beginning January 2018. One of the first lesson’s learned was that when you make a repair, replacement, or upgrade, a host of other item’s must be repaired, replaced, or upgraded.
I knew where I was going to have the swim platform constructed; I did not know precisely how the process would unfold, and, I was still searching for a davit system for the dinghy. One impacted the design of the other. Once I decided on the DinghyRamp system for the dinghy, we could move forward on the swim platform. Once the dinghy ramp system and the swim platform configuration was agreed upon, the next modification was the “aft deck ladder to the swim platform.” The challenge on the ladder design was that the dinghy took up most the available space on the swim platform and did not leave much room for the downtubes of the ladder. We were able to reverse the pitch of the current ladder and with a few “tweaks” and reverse engineering, attach the ladder securely to the swim platform and aft deck. A new ladder was out of the question at this stage of the process. The result, after a year of some sleepless nights, helpful friends, and a lot of patience was a system where the swim platform, dinghy, and ladder now fit as “snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug”!!