Hendrik came aboard today, ferried out to the boat by dinghy, which would be an unremarkable way to start a story except that the dinghy in question chose that same window of time to finish falling apart. The logbook is calling it a state of rapid unscheduled self-disassembly. I call it a dinghy with poor timing and worse judgment about when to make a scene.

There was no replacement waiting, of course. That is not how any of this works, whatever the crew likes to pretend after the fact. A dinghy falls apart, and only then does anyone start looking for a new one. A guest berth in Palma meant nobody needed to swim for it in the meantime, at least, but the next anchorages down the coast would not be so accommodating, so the search still happened in something of a hurry. A new, used dinghy came aboard within a few days.

The old one did not go wherever old dinghies go. Nobody could quite bring themselves to leave it on a foreign dock, so it got wrapped into a sorry sort of bundle and lashed to the stern pushpit, where, as far as I know, it is riding still, all the way back to La Ràpita and however much further this crew intends to drag it. I find I approve. A proper burial is one thing. Hauling the deceased along for the rest of the voyage rather than admit defeat is, historically speaking, exactly the kind of stubbornness a ship’s spirit respects.