Hi All,
Some of you may remember me as I hung around here for some years before
my wife and I left to do a little cruising of our own about 4 months
ago. All is well. After making our way down the California coast and
up into the Sea of Cortez, we’ve returned south to La Paz, about 100
miles up the coast from the tip of Baja where we are having a new jib
made before crossing over to the mainland and continuing south.

Over the years, I’ve given very positive reviews of the Porta-Bote here
based upon our part-time usage of it since we purchased it a little over
3 years ago and I thought I’d just give an update after over 4 months of
continuous usage.

First, the good news: All of the good things I’ve said about this
product in the past remain valid.
-The hull is incredibly rugged. We have run it up onto rocky beaches
and let it rub up against barnacle encrusted rocks with absolutely no
damage beyond a slight roughening of the normally very smooth surface
texture of the hull.
-It rows very easily. I don’t hesitate to row the Porta, whereas I only
rowed the inflatable when the outboard was on the fritz.
-It is much faster with the same small outboard than our 10’ inflatable.
In fact, if I sit in the center seat, our tiny 3.5 hp Nissan will
plane the Porta (I weigh 275 lbs).
-Compared to our inflatable, it’s got a huge amount of room for hauling
groceries, trash, people, etc.
-Beaching it is just a matter of running at full throttle towards shore
and killing the engine just before it gets too shallow for the outboard.
-Setup time is just a handful of minutes, especially with two people
doing it. It takes significantly longer when I do it myself, but with
one of us on each side, it only takes a few minutes. I haven’t actually
timed it, but I think it’s probably faster than putting the floorboards
into the inflatable and pumping it up.
-Unlike inflatables (which are a constant source of problems to a lot of
people down here), it never develops a leak or gets soft.
-It stores very easily on most boats. On our Tayana 37, the 12’ Porta
lies flat on the cabin roof and it is completely out of the way. When
reefing the main, we just step up onto it. It doesn’t hurt it at all.
Most boats stow them on edge along one of the rails.
-They are very stable when stepping down into them (like inflatables),
but you don’t have to step over a wide tube when getting into them at
the dinghy dock. This is a small thing, but when you are old and have
bad knees like I do, you notice these things.
-You stay a lot drier than in our inflatable.

There are also a couple of new good points that have made themselves
known now that we are using it constantly:

-It tows very nicely. At least upwind or at up to about 6 ½ kts
downwind. In fact, it tows so well that while cruising northbound up
the Sea of Cortez, we went for over a month without ever disassembling
it. It wasn’t until a couple of days after we turned around and the wind
and waves picked up while we were underway that we discovered that there
can be a problem towing it downwind. When the speed and waves reached a
certain point, it would start to surf, surging ahead until it buried
it’s nose in the back of the next wave and taking on a bunch of water.
Now, if we’re going downwind, we routinely haul it out of the water and
disassemble it.
-Anytime you leave anything in seawater for an extended time, “stuff”
starts growing on it. The Porta is no exception, but nothing wants to
stick to the polyethylene hull, not even limpets or barnacles. They
just pop right off with a little pressure from a finger. We then rub
the hull down with a little sand to remove the slime and grass that has
started growing.

Now, the bad stuff:
-First and foremost are the plastic seats are failing. First, one of
the plastic straps that hold one of the bails on broke off. This was
inconvenient, but no big deal as it just makes it a little harder to get
the seat in right. But on the middle and aft seats, the bails have
punched through the plastic of the seats and the aft seat is also
starting to buckle on one side. This is bad enough that we are making
new seats out of wood. Now it’s true that I am not a small person, but
even so, there’s no excuse for them to fail so badly so quickly. With
only a 3 ½ hp outboard on it, it’s not like we are really out bashing
into the waves or anything.
-The screws that were used to fasten the aluminum brackets onto the
transom are obviously not stainless steel and are corroding badly.
Eventually, we are going to have to replace them. A minor irritant, but
the manufacturer should never have used a non-stainless fastener in the
first place.
-As we suspected, they are a real pain to get into from the water when
skin-diving (our inflatable is very easy). This is not a major issue.
We brought an inflatable kayak that we intended to tow along if we were
going diving and the intent was that we would use it to get in and out
of the water. In practice though, we haven’t bothered. Instead, we
just run it up to the nearest shore (rocky or otherwise) and get into
and out of the Bote there. This is an option we didn’t have with the
inflatable. If there were no sandy beach nearby, we had to anchor it
and dive from the inflatable.

Overall, we are very pleased with the Porta-Bote and will probably never
go back to an inflatable. We have still yet to inflate our Avon since
we bought the Porta 3 ½ year ago. We do have it with us just in case
the Porta gets stolen or something, but have yet to use it on this trip.

Oh yeah, one last thing. If you are in a populated area such as La Paz
(where we are now) or anywhere else you are using a dinghy dock, expect
strangers to stop you 2 or 3 times a week as you get into or out of your
Porta and spend 5 or 10 minutes asking you questions about it.

Fair winds – Dan Best