Scuba Tank shelf

I (Jon) finished this job on April 4th.

Justin and I had grand designs to go scuba diving dozens and dozens of times. Syzygy already had two tanks that Matt purchased in Mexico for $? dollars each. (100?) Justin and I each purchased an additional one for $400 dollars each. Per usual, Australia is obscenely more expensive than elsewhere. So now with four tanks, there needed to be a better storage system than just laying them down in the port cockpit locker. So I built a small shelf in the port locker to accommodate them. Now they all stand up straight.

Two of the tanks fit great. the third tank in fits with a little bit of maneuvering to get it under a lip that is on the locker lid. The fourth one…. goddamn it if the fourth one doesn’t quite fit. Actually it fits if you take the hard plastic protector off the bottom of the tank. This nets you an additional millimeter or so of space and that allows the fourth tank to fit.

I had to cut a small section of a shelf that was already in the port locker that was holding spare flotation vests. The vests still easily fit and the tanks now use what was once dead space in the locker.

Awesomely, we had thought that the cockpit locker was over-flowingly filled before. Matt and I had both swore at the locker at various times as we tried to pull the drifter out and put it back in while sailing across the Pacific. Now, with the shelf in place, it arranges the tanks into a better position; they create less dead space then when they were lying down flat and they take up some dead space that wasn’t being used previously.  I also rearranged some of the sails already in the locker. Voila! Now everything that used to be in there is still there AND there are two more scuba tanks that fit inside the locker.  AND I actually think getting the drifter in and out of the locker is easier.  Boomsticks. On rare occasions, things just work out.