The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Companionway Integrity In A Storm

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It is amazing how many accounts of disaster at sea include a major ingress of water through the companionway. Here are a couple of good ideas to solve that potential problem.

Paul Kirby, whose survival of a vicious storm south of New Zealand we wrote about in this chapter, sent us some photographs of a very clever latch that he designed and built after finding out the hard way, during a knock down, about the importance of securing the companionway in heavy weather.


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Steve

This looks like a simple, reliable, and strong setup! In the process of researching different locking options for my own sailboat, I came across a similar system used by a Caliber yacht owner. It looks like they may have been able to assemble their system without much custom fabrication.

Link to the forum page where this idea is discussed; link to the McMaster-Carr catalog page listing corrosion-resistant retractable spring plungers (scroll down for the corrosion-resistant options).

Steve Collins

If the line to the latch breaks or comes off, could you be left trapped outside? The latch is spring-loaded, so is there an alternate way to release it? I cannot tell from the pictures.

Walter MacVane

Or a hole on the plugger end to poke a pen or key into and push the plunger out of engagement from the rail.

Andre

I don’t have a companion way…sort of. It is a stainless steel hatch on rollers installed at an angle, that can be completely hidden or closed and locked from the inside or outside. It is very easy to get inside the boat or outside. When the weather is nice, a simple canvas with a mosquito net does the job.

Tony

As a welder, I use this type of spring-loaded latch quite often on the oilfield related equipment we build and they seem to hold up very well to abuse.

There are already a few companies producing/selling this style of latch. One company is Buyers Products Company. We use the weld-on style; they are a good design and almost foolproof, the only problem I foresee is the body of the latch is made from mild steel, not stainless/aluminum which would be ideal.

Also I would suggest a change to the lanyard from cordage to stainless steel aircraft cable with a loop and a large split ring affixed to the loop. Less chance of breakage and easier to grasp hold of with cold and gloved hands.

Nick Hallam

For years and years, UK company Sea Sure have been selling a simple lever device, which provides an external handle (which accepts a padlock when you want to leave the boat), mounted on a short shaft which passes through the top washboard and drives an internal lever: this gives you a) an internal handle and b) a cam which locks into a slot made in the underside of the sliding hatch. It’s not perfect, as it’s quite small, but it’s easily reproducible at a larger scale by any stainless fabrication shop.

On my 30′ sloop, I have a stainless eye bolted through the inboard face of each washboard, near the top. I have a 6 foot length of 6 mm line with a small snap-shackle spliced into one end. As the weather worsens and I want to add washboards, I lead the line through the eyes from top to bottom, snapping onto the topmost eye to deadend the line (a bowline would do, but I had a spare snap and 10 minutes to spare for a bit of therapeutic splicing…). I have a clam cleat mounted on the inboard frame of the companionway, so I just cleat the line off tight. I can reach in from the cockpit, leaning over the washboards to uncleat the line. Pretty basic, but it works. The line is long enough to let me have all the washboards rove onto it but not in place, so if I get pooped with the boards out, at least they won’t swim away.