An accessory to get you back in the boat

As we get older it gets harder and harder to pull ourselves back on board after a capsize. Here is a description of what Dick Cline (Fleet 39) put on his MC 2452 in July 2008 to solve that problem.

As Dick stated in his cover message:

"Now for the answers to questions some will probably have. Remember there is both a tiller and a rudder involved.

When the tiller is absolutely hard over to port, all the way parallel to the stern edge, believe it or not, the rudder does NOT hit the ladder! Really - it doesn't!! When the tiller is hard over to starboard, parallel to the stern edge, yes you can bump the thing, and it move back an inch or so, but just stays there, and obviously the rudder is nowhere close.

As you can see from the deployed position, it goes nicely down in the water, and gives easy steps for reboarding in a quick manner.

There is one modification you can make: shorten the legs, so that when stored it was even with the back deck. That can be done by just cutting the legs and rebolting. It would just look smoother, be just as functional, and probably create less questions of "doesn't that bump...." in the boat yard.

One other detail - inside the boat the stern has a 3/4" sheet of plywood that I added as backing for the bolts to go thru. Takes 2 and 1/2" bolts. The ladder is the standard Flying Scot swim ladder that they sell for about $100 bucks. Do NOT know who else sells them, but Karen at FS could probably tell you. For the plywood backing - I just made an outline of that section of the stern, and cut out the wood full size. Then crawled under and check where it hit stuff, got in the way, etc, and cut those out. It covers most all of that side and gives ya strong backing for the mount, not knowing how large someone might be, felt it best to err on the side of too strong!!"

Here are the pictures - click to see an enlarged version.




Parts list:

Good luck and...See you on the starting line!

Herman van Beek

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