Davits and Dinghies

Another Boat Project: Davits

I hate the dinghy.  I like it for the 1% of the time we need it, but the other 99 is just a pain. There's just no good solution for any boat under 100' in my humble opinion. You either tow it, put it upside down on your deck, deflate it and store it, or lose your swim platform or... get davits.

We decided to get some davits from Kato Marine in Annapolis, MD.

The process is pretty simple. You have to figure out where you want them, measure a bunch of stuff and then like all things boating, hand over a few fist-fulls of cash.  I shouldn't be so cynical. Kato was awesome to work with and they made the process very smooth.  Once the order was finalized we waited for the big box of Kato parts to arrive.

Here are some photos of the mockups for measuring

Christmas on D-Dock
Thanks to UPS Saturday Delivery, we had our davits in time to install before our July trip.  The Kato parts are very high quality. We also had some custom designed stuff made for our installation and everything was very well made.

Getting to work
Time to drill 12 holes in Argon's Transom.  The installation actually went pretty smoothly.  We needed to change the location of the davits outboard a bit because of a contour in the interior of the hull. The flat backing plates would not have sat there very well.