William Butler

Quite often lately I run across some boat tech that I’ve never seen. It always stuns me because it’s hidden in plain sight usually. In this case I saw it on one of those 200 gallon per hour fishing boats. I’ll back up. I hate snaps, twist locks etc. they involve creating holes in fairly delicate things and they are generally supporting shearing forces. As any good mechanical / civil engineer knows, shearing forces are traditionally weak and the wind and sea, well it’s strong. Enough suspense. I needed a way to add angled tarp from my cockpit roof to the transom and I didn’t want to use snaps, twist locks, hooks or bungees. Then I saw this system where the transom has tubes along the aft rail. These tubes can accept a pin. The pin is attached to a grommet with a small bit of line and then is is inserted through a second grommet into the rail. So I built it into my boat. I drilled seven holes at 3/8” I ordered 5/16 stainless tubing and 1/4” x 2” pins with a ring on the end. Effective usable pin is 1.5”. The bit of line with a second grommet it pretty ingenious because it serves a dual purpose of keeping the pin from getting lost and it keeps the pin in the rail tube. Sort of a symbiotic relationship. I’ll post the final pics once I have things officially rigged but here are some shots of the inspiration and my tubes. I cut the long tubes into 12 smaller 50mm tubes with an angle grinder and then embedded them with 4200. The cover pictures are of the inspo boat