To be clear, I have given up on the idea of a skid plate. Now I just want to make sure I don’t miss something in the repair.
And regarding the number of hits on the summer trip, well, we bought the boat so we could pursue family adventures in different places, mostly of the sail camping variety (the boat is just too small for more than a few nights of all 3 of us aboard). It’s also too small to carry or tow a reasonable dinghy (we tried using a packraft for this past summer trip, but it was too much work to inflate and then deflate for a quick midday trip ashore). So…we were left with sailing in close enough to wade ashore - we usually tensioned the boat between an anchor and a line tied on the shore. In a place like Georgian Bay, that put us in reasonably close proximity to rocks (though in all fairness, *all* of Georgian Bay is in close proximity to rocks), and those rocks are not always charted. And we hit a few.
One longer-term solution would be to just buy a bigger boat so we can comfortably sleep aboard and/or have a full-size dinghy. And we may do just that (although right now I am enamored of small, folding, beachable tris like the Astus 22). This was our first boat, though, and the low price was a big factor. So was weight, as we didn’t want to buy a new tow vehicle before confirming this would be an enjoyable family activity. So, I would say, the boat has done exactly what we hoped it would, and now I am just trying to fix the consequences of our learning.
