Small Comforts

Among the pleasures of owning a little boat are the little improvements you can add from time to time to make the boat more useful, more comfortable, and/or more pleasant to sail.

I’ve added a couple of amenities to Slider recently. One is a new deck tent. I probably haven’t finished this one yet, but here’s what it looks like now:

This covers an area approximately 8 feet by 8 feet, from beam to beam and outside the cockpit coamings. There’s still room to set up a small pop-up tent on the center deck, in case of horizontal rain, but in less extreme weather, I think the open tent will be cooler and more pleasant. I have a mosquito net and a folding cot for solo trips and a queen-size air mattress for when Nancy goes with me.

There’s standing headroom over the center deck, which is pleasant. I think of this tent as a way to have a fairly civilized base camp while anchored along some wild shore– shady and well-ventilated in the daytime, with plenty of room for lounging about.

Building the tent didn’t go perfectly. To get a little more headroom under the boom, I used those fiberglass rods you can buy to replace broken tent poles, fitted into pockets to spread the front and back of the tent. Each was two sections, held together by sockets and bungie cord. Unfortunately, there’s a fair amount of strain on the rods, as they are guyed to the fore and aft mooring cleats. I left the tent up for a couple days, and when we had a thunderstorm, one rod snapped at the socket. So I reinforced both rods with a couple wraps of fiberglass tape and epoxy, and they’ve held up now through a couple of windy days. I also had trouble with the sharp ends of the rods chewing through the thin white polytarp of the tent, so I glued a wrap of nylon webbing around the ends to cushion them– no more holes.

My other little project was a table for the cockpits. I didn’t want a very big table, but I thought it would be nice to have something to set my lunch on while sailing. I ended up with this:

It’s quarter inch ply stiffened with a couple of solid stringers underneath, which also space the table on the edge of the coaming. The table, when not in use, fits against the hull side between the aft side deck and seat risers.

The hole and the aluminum sheet are there to convert the table into a cooker, using a single burner propane stove:

This is not a stove I would be inclined to use underway– it’s just not wide enough across the top for perfect stability. But by building it into the table top, it becomes a lot steadier than it is with the plastic base that the propane bottle is designed to fit into, because the burner is held firmly in place at the neck.

Still, I plan to keep my knees out from under the table when there’s a pot of boiling soup on the stove.

This was a case where planning ahead actually worked well. When I designed Slider’s seating arrangement, I knew I would eventually want a small cockpit table, because they are so handy. I set up the seating so that a board laid across the coamings would have enough space over the legs to be comfortable.

It’s good when things turn out as planned.