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Just saw the news that President and Chief Executive Officer of Catalina Yachts, passed away November 15, 2020

https://www.catalinayachts.com/frank-w-butler/

Elastatether in certain conditions like strong tide and opposing winds is not recommended due to probably what you experienced Ron.  While it won't really foul the rudder, it will just break under the force and then you may lose it.

Funny you mention the duck decoy Ron.   We have had people in dinghys go by and try to pick up the Elastatether and try to take it thinking its just floating.  That is why its clearly marked with what it is on the float.  Once they read that they quickly drop it.  I imagine people trying to pick up the duck decoy would be entertaining.

Also the float with block and weight is similar to Elastatether in that it rises and sinks based on the tide due to the giant elastic band.  However even a lighter line can foul a prop.  The elastic will break pretty easily under the force. 

Sue

[not]

Hi All,

I know this can be a controversial topic but hear me out.  Sometimes its helpful to know exactly where your anchor is and to let others know where your anchor is.  I'm aware that there can be issues with creating a marker using just a plain line and a bleach bottle (or similar).  Things like fouling another boats prop - or your own, having the tide rise and the float pulls out your anchor, etc. 

Our friend has invented a product Elastatether that solves these issues.  My son has been manufacturing the product for about a year and has recently taken ownership of the company and several improvements have been made.  I am associated to it but honestly we have used the Elastatether for 2 years on both our Catalina 34 and our Hunter 36 with great success.  It's basically a float on a giant elastic string that adjusts with the tide.  It is made to intentionally give way under strain like another boat running it over so as not to foul their prop.  Note this is not a trip line but it can help you determine where your anchor is to enable you to pull out the anchor in the opposite direction.

Please take a moment and check out the website to see how it works. http://elastatether.com/ and they are now available on Amazon.

Catalina direct has these. I had replaced this on our 87. https://www.catalinadirect.com/index.cfm/product/4607_932/hatch-adjuster-for-fiberglass-hatches.cfm

We are using Bimini Curtain spacers - they make them for 7/8 or 1" tubing.  They hold on quite well for this purpose.  The force is downward and they grab from the top down so no issue with movement and they are easy to drill into to attach to the starboard with the flat edge.  And they are easy to remove with just a lift up of the seat.

I suppose if we were attaching something with more force on it the ones you have shown might be better.

Everything in this is custom. Our seat cushion is 24x12 but the one we are making for our friends is 24x15 because their stern rail is set back further.

The cushion has 2 snaps at the front corners and some Velcro along the back edge to hold it in place.

We had the curved frame made by the stainless company and had them send us the straight legs too. Then ordered the Starboard from a guy on eBay as well as the rest of the parts from Amazon or EBay.

Total cost will be about $360 including making the cushion myself.

Here is one that is theoretically in the HEIF forant.

I don't have any pets to take photos of so this will have to do.

Some recent updates have made it so that image resizing is done automatically when large files are posted so some of these tools are not needed.

I just was chatting with Dave Sanner on another topic and asked him about this.  He added jpeg to the allowable extensions and now just like that we can upload photos from the iphone!  And with the resizing thing, no need to mess around with these other tools.

Thanks to Ken for pointing me at the underlying issue.

Sue

So I just gave Ken's approach a try.  - Unsuccessfully on my phone.

Some issues

1- Resize it is almost non functional on IOS 11 which I stupidly upgraded to prematurely. Usually by the 3rd patch release Apple figures out most of the bugs but not so in this case.  Basically I can't get at the options on the top for done/cancel because they are too close to the top edge of the screen.  I did get to it once and then saved my photo but it kept the jpeg extension - didn't change to jpg

2- If the issue is just the file extension allowed, Dave Sanner should be able to add .jpeg to the allowable extensions and this will resolve the issue.

3 - File size - I thought Dave had made some adjustments to automatically resize the attachments?  Thought I read that in another post while trying to figure out how to upload from my phone. 

I'll give your suggestions a try, thanks

Craig,
The problem is every boat is a little different and so hard to make a consistent design. We tried ours on 3 different boats and each one needed changes to some dimension. Not sure there would be a enough  commonality to make it work on a larger scale.

I ran across an issue that I guess I never realized before.  You can't post pictures from your iphone or ipad to the forum.  You would need to get those pictures to your computer and then upload them which is rather inconvenient for me.  Usually on the boat I don't have my computer so I would have to wait to get home to do this.

I think there is a solution that would require an add in to the Simple Machines forum that is being used.  It's called Tapatalk.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapatalk
  With it you would use an app to see the forum.

Dave Sanner - Web Admin would need to add this.  Since I am a pretty infrequent user of the forum at this point, I thought I would get input from others on whether this is desirable before I go back to Dave to discuss.

Here are the photos of our helm seat. As you can see it uses 2 Bimini stand off pieces to secure it to the stern rail and then the 2 legs in the front. 1/2" starboard provides the seat with an added 2 inch cushion. We can lean a little against the pool noodle on the lifeline gate. This removes easily to access the swim platform.  It stores for us if we are at anchor for a few days under the dodger on the cabin too turned upside down.

I just wanted to follow up on this post.  Since we had cutting, bending and welding of stainless tubing and some precision on the measurements we were hesitant to do this ourselves given the cost of the material.  So after looking at all the options people proposed I had a VERY tough time getting any quotes to do this.  And some of those we got were in the $1000 or more range. 

I finally found a company that advertised in Good Old Boat magazine - Stainless Outfitters in Ontario Canada https://stainlessoutfitters.com/

They gave me a very good quote of $232.95 including the shipping and customs and included some extra parts and did a beautiful job of it and were very pleasant to work with.  I would highly recommend them.

So, what did we build you ask?  As many of you know we sold our 1987 Catalina 34 and bough a 2008 Hunter 36 - Try not to groan too hard on that.  The previous owner of our Hunter had designed a really great helm seat and some friends with a slightly older Hunter 36 wanted to replicate it.  I think this design can work for some of the Catalina 34 boats especially those with a walk through transom with some modifications on the measurements so I wanted to share some photos here.  I don't have good photos of it actually installed so I will get those this weekend and post here.