Ardea gains some much needed storage

Sorry for the delay, we've been busy with final preparations and I know that you all have been patiently waiting for my first blog post.  It seems that everything is going well as we prepare to embark except for the weather. The unnaturally warm weather that we've had for the last few months may be finally giving way to our first storm;,which is supposed to arrive tomorrow and last through the weekend. Departure may be delayed for a couple days but we're still shooting for this coming Sunday if possible. As our projects finally wrap up we can hopefully get some more blog posts up before we take off.


One of the many obstacles in sailing across an ocean with three people on a 31 foot boat is storage. We all have our own personal luggage and lots of toys (surf boards, kite boards, instruments, fishing and diving gear, etc.) not to mention the important stuff such as food, water, tools, spare parts and the dozens of other things necessary for such a journey. To fit all of this stuff on the boat it was clear that every inch of open space would need to be utilized. Somehow, I was haphazardly chosen as the resident carpenter on Ardea. While Connor was pretending to work at his job in Oakland I was assigned my first major project: to build a set of shelves in the starboard lazarette (the space below the cockpit on the right side of the boat). It is a large space but initially there was only a small, flimsy set of plastic shelves that were unable to hold much of anything aside from the few quarts of oil you see there in the background of the picture to the right. 

The plastic shelves were promptly removed and it was time to start designing some sort of shelves that would fill up the space but would not be so big as to block the access to the engine or the boat's batteries and wiring system. The problem with building anything below deck on the boat is that we did not want to attach anything to the hull. That would create an unnecessary pressure point that after many thousands of miles of pounding at sea could eventually lead to a weakness in the hull. This meant that everything for the shelves would need to be attached to the deck or the cockpit framing.

I decided that two tiers of shelves would be the most useful, with the top layer being removable to provide easy access to both levels from the cockpit. After many measurements,  I was able to create a couple of square braces that would support two layers of shelving and that could be screwed into the deck joists on the top and the cockpit on the side. The bottom shelf could be made permanent and so it was screwed into the bottom of the braces and into a wood frame which was supporting the fuel tank underneath the cockpit. 




To create the top shelves it was simply a matter of cutting our redwood boards to the correct length and fitting them onto the braces. In actuality, all of this was quite difficult due to the cramped space we were working in and the nature of constructing anything on a boat, which seems to involve a lot of trial and error and a lot of time.

The next area needing some shelving was the far aft quarter; where we figured that we could possibly fit 6 jerry cans for water. We had considered ditching the shelves and using water bladders instead but again, we didn't want to put the weight on the hull and we would have had to build some braces anyway to stop them from sliding into the bilge. Once again we wanted to attach everything from above especially since these shelves would be holding nearly 250 pounds of water when full. Thanks to Connor's impressive dumpster diving skills we were able to locate an old stainless steel pulpit from which we removed two of the stanchions to act as supports for our aft joist. We attached the stanchions to the underside of the deck and bolted them in place with a stainless backing plate on the top side of the deck (we used the stainless steel triangles seen in the picture to the right as backing plates).


We drilled some holes in the bottom of the stanchions and bolted on a pressure treated 2x4 for a joist. the other joist was screwed in to the backside of the cockpit and we used up the rest of our redwood for shelving. Everything turned out better than we had hoped and we were able to easily fit the 6 jerry cans- an extra 30 gallons of freshwater storage.

As Connor mentioned we were also able to rig up a rain catchment system for the starboard jerry cans that will allow us to manually pump rainwater directly to our faucet (we'll have more on that in another post). 

In the meantime we also threw in another set of small shelves in the bilge which can be accessed underneath the floor in the cabin.  However, an errant design flaw left the shelves only tall enough for your standard can of food and a just a little too short for can of beer. Further modifications may be needed.

We're all getting very excited as the departure date nears, more blog posts should be up soon so stay tuned. In the mean time, we'll be organizing all of our stuff... a bit daunting (see below).