Okay let’s talk about how we manage to keep a board or more each (there’s six of us!) on our 46ft catamaran… and make sure they don’t get any more banged up or dinged than they already are.
Sound hard? It’s not too bad! Let’s walk through how we make it work aboard Happy Days.
The Boat
Let’s get started and take a quick look at our Leopard 46 catamaran: it has five cabins (including a forepeak), two tables – one inside and one outside, four bathrooms, and a reasonably small kitchen.
Now, if you think about that living space filled with six people and all their stuff: we all surf, we all kitesurf, we all free dive, and we all wing foil… admittedly we don’t have six set-ups for all of us, we have to share. Still, even then that’s a lot of toys to cram in!
Now you probably understand why fitting surfboards in can be tricky, especially as they are kind of fragile and awkward to store.
The Boards
All right, a run-through of our boards… they do change but the current set-up we have looks a bit like this: six boards – one each – ranging from 5’4” to 8’0”, and then we also have an 8’0” as a fun utility board for everyone to share when it’s small, a twin fin foamy for a similar purpose (smaller days), and finally we have three old boards that we keep tucked away in case of emergencies when we’re in the middle of nowhere and someone snaps their board (it’s happened before!), oh and a stand-up-paddleboard (SUP), three foil boards, and three kiteboards.
So adding those up we have EIGHTEEN boards. Wow, I hadn’t added them up before… that’s more than I thought!
Okay so we have a few boards – trust me we could have more! – how on earth do we fit them?
Where Do We Keep Them?
We’ve made it to the important part. First, we have the starboard forepeak. Now the forepeak is up the bow (front) of the boat and is only accessible from the deck.
In the starboard forepeak we have our huge water maker (turns salt water into fresh drinking water…more on that in a later blog)… and seven boards. Five surfboards and two foil boards.
It’s perfect because the boards fit in under the roof and we have a steel bar (it used to be a bed set up) that we can strap them on to. I realise now that it would be hard to conjure up an image of what I’m talking about so here’s a photo:
So that’s space number one where we keep our short boards, they’re out of the sun and elements, they are nice and secure, and once they’re away we don’t even have to think about them.
Space number two is a little less, well, inside… okay, they live on the side of the boat, that’s definitely outside. Anyways, we have the two 8’0” boards, the twin fin foamy, the third foil board, and the SUP, all living on the port side, all except the SUP in board bags protected from the sun. It works well and they don’t get any worse treatment than the others.
Okay, so we still have three spare boards and three kite boards… that brings us to space number three: a compartment that holds all our kite gear including the kite boards, as well as the water tanks and anchor chain… it’s a pretty awesome spot.
Finally, we keep the spare boards in a big board bag that we hang under the solar panels at the stern, they’re up out of the way and there if we need them.
How We Look After Them
So you now know where we store our boards but let’s look at how we look after the surfboards in particular on the boat.
I’d like to give a fair notice we do USE our boards, we don’t just sit them there and go ‘That’s nice’ No, we surf them at reef breaks, beach breaks, from big to small waves, and pretty much whatever we can find.
Having only a board each when the swell is a good size means that everyone’s board is well used, and if you ding it, you repair it because it’s highly likely you’ll want to surf it the next day!
A few things we like to do would be:
- Never leave them out on deck – as soon as we get back from a session they go away, either back in the forepeak or in their bags on the side.
- We use bungee cords to tie them in, making sure they can’t move AT ALL because we don’t know what sort of conditions we might suddenly find ourselves in!
- When stacking them in the dinghy we do it in a way where the board going on is the opposite way to the board under it, resulting in a stack with the nose of the boards near the fins. We then tie them down and are good to go.
Those are probably the main things we like to do, how we do repairs onboard is a whole other blog post so I will just say that we have epoxy and glass on board should we have to repair something – I’ve lost count of how many repairs we’ve done, our boards all have at least one or two epic stories to tell!
So we always try our very best to take care of the boards, but I think it’s important to note that living on a boat, your boards are something to be used and loved, but they may not always look like you want and you have to be okay with that – it’s all part of it!
Summary
There you have it! No more wondering where we keep all those boards and how we manage to look after them.
It’s different from boat to boat and I bet there are some pretty interesting ideas people have come up with to make it work!
I would love to know how you keep your boards, whether on land or afloat, I’m always interested so please let me know in the comments!