Yoders Afloat: 6/19/2010 - Storage where there once was none

Saturday, June 19, 2010

6/19/2010 - Storage where there once was none

On our last foray to the valley to pick up supplies for our trip, we got a bunch of primary and secondary filters for our watermaker. When we got back to the boat and started rooting around in various cubbyholes, I discovered that I had already bought quite a few filters. Suddenly we had 20 filters to find a place for. To make matters worse, on our last order from SailRite, I bought 10 rolls of sail repair tape. This isn't quite as obsessive as it sounds since the rolls are only 15' long and a 3' rip in a sail will require 6' of tape. But, they are bulky and we now had to also find a place to stow them.

I've always been very protective of the space in my engine room. It's really nice to have room around the engine in which to work. But, there is a lot of space down there.

With this in mind, I designed a bag that would hang on the engine room bulkhead, would be easily removable, and, hopefully would hold a lot of stuff. I turned my rough drawing over to Lulu and she broke out the Featherweight and a bolt of Sunbrella and went to work.

In a fairly short time, she had turned my vision into reality. I took the "pocket" and a handful of Common Sense fasteners into the engine room and hung it up. Then I proceeded to load it up. We were both amazed at how much it held. It took all the filters and sail tape and had room for more.

There was enough extra room that I was able to stuff two bags of Scotch-Brite pads in as well. Each bag contains 20 pads, each of which are about 6" x 9". They stick out the top but they're contained. You can't tell from these photos but there are actually two pockets side-by-side that run the complete height of the unit. And, if I need access to the oil behind the pocket, I can just undo a couple fasteners and reach behind. If I need room in the engine room for bigger jobs, the whole things comes out as easily as it went in.