When we are underway on Harmonie I spend a lot of time at the nav station. A good comfortable seat there is important. After all, if my butt isn’t happy, the rest of me isn’t either. On my old boat the nav station was a very comfortable spot, and it was my preferred spot for writing, or general computer work, or even just lounging. On Harmonie I have only been at the nav station when I needed to be there.
Just try and type with your elbows at this angle!
Amel’s original stool for sitting at the nav station desk is, well, sub-optimal. It was too low to start with, making keyboard work at the desk a painful exercise. After 20 years the foam had collapsed enough that now it was even lower. When the boat heeled to port, there was nothing to keep you from sliding off the back of the stool, except friction. A new seat has been on our radar for a while.
When we toured an Amel 54, the newer updated version of our boat, at the show we noticed that Amel had added a short backrest to the stool, to keep the navigator’s butt on the seat while the boat bounced around. When we saw visited vendors at the show, we realized that a full seat with arms and back, though very comfy, was going to be out of scale for the space. Fortunately, they had a stool with a stainless bar for a backrest, that was very comfortable, and as a bonus makes a great hand hold while moving about the cabin..
Now, the problem is how to mount it. The Amel pedestal is about 1 7/8 inches in diameter, much smaller than used by any supplier we saw. Time for some engineering… Cutting and stacking some disks from scrap plastic made a stub of a post that the seat could easily sit on. Almost perfect.
Of course you change one thing, and that means something else isn’t right. Raising the seat makes the desk height better, but now my feet dangle off the floor. Very uncomfortable for any length of time. So we also got a foot rest to mount on the post. That’s the next phase of the project…
fetchinketch 