From Cooking Aboard a Small Boat
Picture this: you drift into your favorite cove on a dying afternoon breeze. Dropping a stern anchor, you drift up to a tree on the nearby shore. Passing a line around the tree, you pull in the stern anchor line and tuck yourself neatly offshore, away from the bugs (that’s the way I did it down in Tennessee). As the sun sets behind the nearby mountain, you prepare an evening meal for your favorite boat companion.
And there you sit, trying to cook, serve and eat your meal while balancing your plate and utensils on your lap, the cockpit seats or any other flat surface within reach. Sound familiar? Well, this upgrade will help solve those problems—a cockpit table.
Ternabout came with a table that was supposed to be used in the cabin. It fit in a recess in the inside of the foot well on the aft end and rested on the galley top of the forward end. The problem was that, with the table in place, you couldn’t move in or out of the cabin. I soon made a new, narrower table for the main cabin.
The old table was neat, though. It stored handily under the foot well inside the cabin. A little thought and a few supplies allowed me to turn it into an ideal cockpit table. No more balancing plates on my lap! While you may not have such a table aboard your boat, I’ll give you enough information to build your own. In fact, I’ll assume you don’t have one and go from there. This project assumes you do have a tiller though.
The table itself is a piece of ¾” plywood, 22 x 22 inches. There are several alternatives for this plywood. If you want to be fancy, order up a piece of teak plywood (after taking out the bank loan). You could use a piece of fir plywood, as long as it’s not warped and is exterior grade. Any voids should be filled with epoxy. If you can’t find flat ¾” plywood, you could take two pieces of 3/8” plywood and epoxy them back-to-back to cancel out any warps.
My choice would be ¾” MDO plywood. This is exterior plywood with a smooth phenolic paper bonded to both sides. It’s made with waterproof glue and designed for exterior signs—great stuff and reasonably priced. Contact a local sign shop and see if they’ll cut you a piece to the size needed. Note that my table came with a notch in one end to fit around the dagger board trunk. It turned out to be just the thing to provide space for the mainsheet.
Next, you apply an edging and cover the top surface with a laminate (unless you bought the teak-faced plywood). The edging can be any complimentary wood; oak is nice or maybe mahogany. You may also want to cut the corners at a 45° angle, or round them, to avoid sharp, rib attacking corners. Epoxy the strips in place and then sand the top surface smooth. If you are using fir plywood, you will need to seal the wood before applying the laminate. I’d recommend going ahead and coating the whole table with epoxy and sanding smooth.
Once this is done, you can glue the laminate in place with contact cement. I always use the old-fashioned, smelly stuff; it sticks better and lasts longer. Apply two coats to each surface allowing each coat to dry until your finger doesn’t stick to it. Place several dowels across the tabletop to support the laminate away from the contact cement while you locate the laminate (you get exactly one chance to get the laminate in the right position, once the two coated surfaces touch, they won’t come apart).
Once the laminate is in position, take the center dowel out and press the laminate in place. Work from the center out, removing a dowel and pressing the laminate down. As a final step, use a laminate roller and roll the laminate firmly in place.
With the laminate installed, you can trim the edges with a router and a laminate trimmer bit. If you want to get fancy, you can use an ogee or other bit to form a more complex edge. Or you can just contact cement strips of the same laminate as the top along the sides and then trim the edges to size.
With the tabletop finished, let’s move on to the mounting hardware. I cut out a folding aft leg from a piece of ¾” ply. The top end was cut at an angle so the leg would go over center when folded out. You’ll need to experiment with the length of the legs to get the table level. The leg unit was fastened to the bottom of the table with a length of piano hinge. I used plastic furniture protectors hammered into the bottom of each leg to protect the fiberglass.
The forward end of the table is held in place by a bracket that fits over the end of the tiller. Ternabout’s tiller is square, which worked out great. The tiller is clamped in place by a short length of wood and tightened with two wing nuts. The wing nuts turn on two hanger bolts screwed into the brace. If you measure properly the first time, you won’t have to add the spacer to the brace that I did on my table.
The cockpit table set up with the rear leg folded down and bungeed off to the stern pulpit.
A view from below showing the forward tiller mount.
The folding rear leg stowed and bungeed in place.
I also screwed eyebolts into the aft side of the brace and the leg. I used a short bungee cord to keep the leg folded flat while stored. When I’m ready to deploy the table, I set the tiller tamer to hold the tiller in place. Then it is a simple matter to unfold the legs and clamp the forward bracket on the end of the tiller. The bungee goes around the mainsheet horse and the eyebolt in the table leg to hold the aft end of the table steady.
The table stores under the cockpit foot well on the inside of the cabin. An “L” shaped runner is fastened to each side of the lower surface of the foot well to allow the table to freely slide in and out. It never slides out while under way, probably because there is too much other junk in the way.
Well, now you can enjoy that quiet evening in your favorite cove, just you and your whoever. Well, except for those 200hp, 16’ bass boats—but dealing with them is a whole ‘nother project! •SCA•
Send us photos of your small-boat cooking solutions to josh@smallcraftadvisor.com.
I love Cap'n Pauley's articles. The photos and diagrams make them so easy to follow!
Great idea, but it will have to wait on my next boat. I currently camp cruise aboard a GP14, so cooking or even eating aboard is a challenge at best. In the mean time, I am saving this article and pics so I can remember it. Thank you.