Tender Touch-Up

An old inflatable is given a new lease of life

- Peter Nielsen

All last winter the faded red Achilles inflatable floated in an empty slip, a rose with its bloom most definitely gone, abandoned, I was told, by a cruiser who’d moved up to a RIB. In the autumn gales she filled with rainwater and in the coldest New England months she cradled a massive block of ice within her tubes. Yet those same Hypalon tubes had held air for the six months she’d been floating there, and the Achilles pedigree had to count for something. I was looking for an inexpensive tender, and this one was free; perhaps she was worth saving.