Well, it finally happened: last night, someone tried to steal my dinghy from the dock.
I rolled in from dinner and a movie at around 1:30am to find my padlocked steel cable twisted up around the dock cleat. At first I thought someone had just pulled the cable in and tied it tightly to rein in my dinghy closer to the dock; this has happened once before when the dock was really crowded. When I looked closer however it was apparent that someone had pulled the cable in and used a lever of some sort (perhaps one of my oars?) to twist the cable extremely hard in an obvious attempt to snap it.
I’m surprised at the attempt, frankly – the cable, for one, is just a cable I made from vinyl-covered steel clothesline cable, and it would have been easy to cut with a pair of cable cutters. Furthermore, the cable is only held in place with a bolt-based cleat under some shrinkwrap tubing, so someone with a knife and a wrench could have taken the cable apart with little hassle. These two things tell me that the attempted theft was by someone who wasn’t equipped to steal, as a bike thief or a professional would surely have some basic tools. I also noticed a bunch of new graffiti on the dock, which may have been a coincidence, but which makes me think that perhaps it was just a bunch of kids looking to take my dinghy for a joyride. Looking around the dock, I realized that mine was the only dinghy with oars, so that would reinforce my theory somewhat.
I’m not sure what I would have done if the dinghy had been successfully taken. It’s too late in the year to swim for it, and I don’t particularly want to try swimming in False Creek to begin with. It is clearly time to take the locking of my dinghy more seriously.