Hobie Cat Hibernation

I spent the weekend preparing to store the sail boat. It's turned out to be a demonstration in procrastination. The boat is not even two months old yet, she's sailed all but 3 weekends since labor day, and I'm just not ready to put her away. However it's getting cold now, and I'm afraid that despite the incredible fall winds there are no longer enough boats on the water to make further adventures safe.

We have a fairly large two car garage- large enough to fit all of the kids bicycles, lawnmowers, snowblowers, etc plus a minivan and car- but not large enough to fit all that and a 17-foot catamaran.... or so one would think! Enter my grandfather- the great sailor, the father of tinkerers. I remember as a small child going to my granparents house and peeking into the garage door to see his sailboat suspended from the ceiling, high above the cars. He had built neat shelves to house the mast, the sails, life jackets, and all the other goodies associated with sailing.

So rather than leave my poor little boat out to freeze her rudders off for the winter, I've decided to follow suit. We have 10foot ceilings in our garage which make it near perfect for the task. Right down the center is a great runway on which to bring her in for take off by pushing the trailer in by hand and line everything up.

It was a fairly simple task, in theory. It ended up taking me an entire day due to a few mistakes and oversights on my part (lets just say I now recommend spending a few extra bucks on the full-quality pulleys!). But in the end, the boat was raised up half way where it could be packed and prepped for storage at its full altitude. The dual trampolines of the Hobie Getaway make a perfect place to store sailing related equipment and maybe even a little more. The sails, rudders, trapeze harness, life jackets, etc will all fit nicely with room to spare.


For those of you engineering-types, the boat weighs about 350lbs fully rigged. My plan was to suspend it from four ropes due to the size, each rope carrying about 90 lbs. The lines holding the front of the boat are tied to the fore beam using a trucker's hitch knot in order to easily adjust the height of the nose. They each go through a pulley directly above and head toward the rear of the boat where they join the lines coming from the aft beam.

With the boat fully down on the trailer, I tied Appalachian butterfly knot in each aft line and tied the front lines to the rear lines using a bowline knot. Now the aft lines are each carrying the load from the corresponding side of the boat. The lines head over to the wall where they turn downwards through another set of pulleys and meet on a load ring. A come-along winch mounted at floor level will pull this load ring down as it raises the boat up to the ceiling. I mounted a 2x4 to the wall to help take the compression load between the come-along and pulleys. Everything is well-lagged into the studs, including two "safety hooks" which I can place the load ring over to take the load off of the winch and eliminate it as a source of failure. In the end, the garage roof has a fairly distributed load about equal to two men standing withing 5 feet of the side of the attic.

Job done. Now to find something to do on the weekends until spring...