Grouching about crouching — it’s the height problem again
Issue 41 : Mar/Apr 2005
Being tall may be overrated as a social asset. As a taller female, I’ve never been convinced of the advantages. First, many of the interesting boys were too short. Later, after I waited for their height to catch up with mine, many of the interesting men weren’t quite tall enough either, by my standards of the time. It took a while longer before I realized that there are more important criteria for a lasting partnership.
As a sailor, this height problem strikes me again and again. (Right in the noggin sometimes, in fact.) Mystic, our C&C 30, has standing headroom in the main cabin, although you can’t stand up exactly straight when working in the galley where the floor slopes up and the overhead slopes down. We manage to overlook that, however. The real problem is the overhead beam at the bulkhead by the head and hanging locker. This is a beam that can take our heads off time after time . . . in spite of owning this boat for more than a decade. I have a funky little macramé hanging suspended from that beam. It’s usually in our line of vision and (particularly when we’re not wearing caps with visors) saves us from many hard knocks.
That macramé hanging (we’ll call it ropework since I did refer to Ashley’s Book of Knots when I set to work on this project so long ago) looked tacky after a couple of years. We figured we could do without it. After all, we’d been trained, surely, hadn’t we, after several years on the boat? Not so. The ropework was retrieved from the trash and went right back up. It’s been there ever since.
Once you’ve passed beyond the bulkhead and its overhead beam (without incident, we’ll presume), you are in a space that looks at the V-berth, head, and hanging locker. And you’re no longer standing up straight. At least I’m not. And Jerry’s not either. We’re not all that tall really. I’m 5 feet 9 inches and shrinking. Jerry’s 5 feet 10 inches and shrinking.
Hunching headroom
What we’ve got in the head is what we call hunching headroom. We can’t stand up straight to brush our teeth, sort through the hanging locker or the tool bins that are stored there, or change clothes in the only privacy afforded by a C&C 30 if company is aboard. There. That explains at least part of our reluctance to those friends and relatives who’d like to be invited to come along more often than once in a blue moon!
But Mystic is our large boat! We have a trailerable boat in the backyard . . . the one not yet sailed . . . the project boat . . . our Mega 30, also designed and built by C&C. Jerry justified buying a 30-foot trailerable because it offered at least a little standing headroom. (I’ll admit that it’s rumored to be as quick as the wind, and he’s more than a little excited about that possibility.) But standing headroom is hard to come by in trailerables. Trailerable boats offer a lot of flexibility in terms of sailing destinations. As it turns out, however, you have to be very flexible yourself, or very young, or very short, in order to reap the rewards. We are none of these.
So it’s a game of inches. The only possible standing space in the Mega 30 is under a bubble top, which means that, at least on this boat, you can stand up straight to do the cooking or the dishes. But more would be better, so the first thing we removed was the tired overhead panel. We got back an inch or two under the bubble top that way. Now I’m eyeing the floor grating. It must be an inch thick or a bit more. Surely there’s half an inch to be had there . . .
To make up for the benefit of actually standing at the sink, the Mega sailor is nearly doubled over when moving around in any other part of the boat. And to make matters worse, that sailor has to double over and crouch sideways in a crablike maneuver. The main passageway has a massive obstruction: the daggerboard trunk. We have to love the daggerboard trunk. It will allow this boat to go where others fear to tread. It allows for trailerability. But it’s smack dab in the middle of the living space!
Since we don’t seem to be shrinking fast enough to fit our boats and there doesn’t seem to be any cosmetic surgery offered for too-tall sailors, the best thing to do is spend most of our time in the cockpits of our sailing vessels. So that’s where you’ll find us in all but the worst conditions. For the taller sailors among us, it’s really the safest place to be!
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
