Hello Cruisers,
Attached are four photos which I hope give a sense of our
cockpit layout.
I am trying to improve comfort. The challenges are:
1. The Swanson 42 has a very tall deckhouse. Lovely to shelter behind in bad
weather, but a right pain to see over. I am over 6' tall and I have to stand pretty upright to see over it.
2. My wife is a fair bit shorter and has to use a special step when
steering.
After a while, if we are healing by more than 5 degrees, it gets pretty tiring to stand at the
wheel, step or not. You tend to end up sitting on the ledge behind the
wheel and standing up now and then for a look around. Looking through the wheelhouse is possible, but not ideal, as should be apparent from the photos.
I would really like to setup some kind of seat on the rear ledge just behind the wheel, but having looked at was on the shelf of the local
chandlery, I was not convinced by anything I saw. The idea is to make
steering more comfortable and thus encourage more hand steering and less use of the auto pilot.
Any suggestions on a seating arrangement that would make steering more comfortable would be very much appreciated. Photos would be even better if you have such a thing. I've been clicking through boats on various
boat broker sites for hours without seeing anything that I think would
work.
Thanks for looking,
Matt