De Pan

This is the bow of a new and large center console off shore fishing boat that often goes into the Gulf of Mexico for fishing and diving. After the first trip, the owner calls and wants an anchor winch installed. It seems it wasn't a lot fun to hand haul a couple hundred feet of rode, chain and anchor up from the bottom of the Davy's Jones locker. So I go over to see the boat, and this is what I found. The shiny thing on the bow is a pop up running light. Just to the right and left of the bow light are pop up chocks, and you can see on the left side aft one of two pop up cleats (you can click on the pic for a better view). So just where would the builder think a anchor winch would go? The hatch covers the entire locker! Apparently they didn't think anyone with a large offshore fishing vessel would want one of those new fangled anchor winch devices on their boat. Popeye didn't need a winch on his boats, but then he had lots of spinach. Unfortunately the owners didn't have any cans of spinach on board. All is not lost, and there is a way to solve this problem. I will show you the results in a couple of weeks. A little design forethought by this builder would have saved this owner some real money.