Reeling in ... the boat!

We have friends that cruise in the (B.C.) Broughtons and just love it. One of the aspects of anchoring there is that it can be tight, and can be deep. So you need lots of rode, but you don't want to swing. 

The solution is to tie the stern to the shore. There are plenty of trees, and even iron rings pounded into the rock walls for this purpose.  You can of course just use a line, but I found out about the Ultraline Reel and wanted to utilize that. It's a large reel with floating flat line. I chose the 263' version.

There are several web pages out there where people talk about how they attached the reel to the boat. I knew that by working with the factory we could come up with a super slick method.

We decided we would wait until our factory visit to actually decide. Once there, we played with the reel in several locations of the big stainless staples on the swim step.  

Here is the location we chose. The mounting is easy, and the line will stay reasonably away from tender operations. But in the first iteration, there wasn't a locking mechanism. So I asked them to take care of that, which they did.

It's amazing to see this work done literally in minutes. 

I was laying in bed that night kind of thinking about the times I would deploy this reel, and all of a sudden I thought "wait, where will I store this big, somewhat heavy, thing? I have to find a place in the lazarette I guess." 

​I was thinking about areas that were big enough, and then had a brainstorm.

Just put one of the same mounts on a free wall. (Without the locking mechanism.) Another cruising detail dialed in!