I’ve come to the conclusion that I think I have the absolute best dinghy setup for where I am in life right now.

We picked up a Portland Pudgy. She’s 7feet 8 inches and weights 128 pounds. White rotomolded polyethylene just like ocean kayaks. She also has to be the most stable dinghy I’ve ever seen. Essentially double hulled with storage in between the two hulls we still find a way to keep her full of stuff.

I power her off a 55lbs thrust trolling motor. That works out to just under 1hp which is plenty for one person but can get a bit slow when we really overload her. Which since we’re three guys, and I’m the size of two, plus a week or two’s worth of groceries she can be slow. We also joke that she’s a “full displacement dinghy” this adds to her stability but also slows her down.

The dinghy is powered by a 100ah Lithium battery which we also use to power a massively oversized bilge pump. I got the same one that is in the big boat so in an emergency where the primary bilge pump has failed and if I’ve replace it with our backup and that were to fail for some reason then we’d have a 2nd backup. Having a bilge pump in the dinghy is the best feature. We never have to bail her out. And if there is any bit of water I just get in first and when I sit in the rear the whole boat shifts just enough to rush the water back to the bilge pump.

The 100ah lithium is charged by a 100 watt solar panel. I picked up a folding kit from Renology off Amazon for about $150 (it’s more now but still a great deal) and it has worked well. The hinges rusted off so I had to replace them with stainless steel, and we discovered that while waterproof the charge controller is not in fact submersible so we had to replace that (that one was my fault) and we discovered that Renology had just placed the ends of the wires into the charge controller and used the screw pads to pressure them in. In the salt water those corroded off repeatedly so I finally got around to putting some heat shrink round terminal ends on there for a proper connection that I’m hoping will stand the test of time.

Now don’t get me wrong I do from time to time wish I had a “zoom zoom” dinghy but can’t get over how convenient our setup is. Perhaps when I get my big fancy catamaran I’ll also get a Zero Jet which is an electric dinghy that really goes ZOOM but until then I’ve got the perfect setup for my needs.