Bouncing versus rolling

5º 53.898s 130º 57.586w

Fri May 03 2019

If you’re on a monohull and you’re going to sea, everything better be tidied away. Once you get sailing the boat heels, and the uphill side dumps all the loose items onto the sole. Sometimes with catastrophic results. It really gets interesting in the galley or the head. A poorly designed galley has cabinets whose cabinets will attack you when opening the door to hunt for something. Good luck with that. A liter of fish sauce breaking on the sole then leaking down into the bilge will create the lovliest odors later. Oh yeah, and try using a sidewards mounted head when the seat is uphill. Brace yourself, Ebby!

The cooker is mounted on gimbals. Generally there will be a few gimballed cup holders mounted in strategic locations, otherwise it’s sippy cup time. I think the ideal monohull sailor is equipped with one leg shorter than the other so the sailor can stand vertically when the boat is heeled. Kind of like the cows we had when we lived on the side of Rocky Face mountain. Legs shorter on one side than the other. Only problem was they could only walk up and down the mountain in one direction. Oh, and level ground was a real problem. Just don’t go there.

Jamie and Behan came aboard for some of Isabel’s legendary margaritas before we departed Mexico, and he noted that we were not ready to go to sea, I suppose because there was still stuff out on horizontal surfaces. Unsecured stuff.

Well, yes we do have a bit of clutter and we’re working on that, but cats are different. They don’t heel much, and if they do you’re fixin’ to get in a lot of trouble. Stuff pretty much stays put. The cooker isn’t mounted on gimbals, and stuff stays put in the cabinets. It’s an easier and safer, i.e. more friendly sea going galley. That is, until big beam seas come along, and the shorter the period and steeper the sea, the worse it gets. That’s when things do start to fall down and go boom.

After about 17 days at sea it finally happened to us. Isabel had a jewelry knick-knack box on the side board in our forward master berth. A combination of pitching and rolling launched it resulting in a loud crash followed by an announcement for “cleanup on aisle 3”.

The other thing that happens is that rather than tipping over, something like a cup of coffee bounces straight up into the air. Cat’s shuffle around, a different motion than a monohull, and we get these icky impulsive inputs when a wave slaps the underside of the bridge deck or one of the amas on the inside. Our saloon dining table seems to be mounted at the epicenter for these little earthquakes, and a 6 or above on the Richter scale can wreck a great cup 'o joe, not to mention the table cloth.

Might be a great problem to solve for some engineer geek. I’m on it!