Dual Purpose

On any boat, even one as large as a Lagoon 46 catamaran, space is a limited and valuable commodity.  Wherever it is possible to make one thing serve two purposes is a big win because the same storage/volume/space is used for two different things.  Here, Mike and Rebecca on s/v One Love turn a single-use piece of furniture into dual-use:

The list of things that we don’t like about the Leopard 4600 is very short, and we just made the list one item shorter. The large stock salon, while perhaps good for inside dining, got very little use by us, at least for that particular application. In the warm Caribbean, almost all dining on One Love, and on our friends’ charter boats, is done outside. The table is so large that it makes it difficult to access the under-seat storage that is so important for us. It also requires someone to kind of scoot around if they want to sit on the rear side. All in all, it was an undesirable thing for us, and one that we wanted to get rid of.


Many of our friends with 4600s had already done away with the table, replacing it with a store-bought coffee table or ottoman. While they all look great, we wanted something a bit more custom to work with our Engel cooler that, up till this point, we kept under the dining table. Enter Puerto Rican Danny, a local wood worker. Over the past couple of months, Danny took our suggestions and crafted for us the table that you see in the photos below. It fits perfectly over our cooler and as you can see, the top lifts up to give us easy access to it. He also did a great job of matching the wood and design to One Love’s interior.

Ventilation for the cooler is obviously important so he left spaces at the bottom and below the table top to allow air to flow in and out. If we determine that more air is necessary, we’ll cut a vent in the rear. At this point though, it does not seem to be warm inside the box. Another thing I had him do was have the fiddles, the raised edges around the table top, not go all the way to the corners. If you’ve ever had to get crumbs off of a table with fiddles before, you’ll understand why I had it built this way.