custom v-berth mattress « 1969chriscraftroamer46

Bad news: the surveyor never showed up.

I got to the marina at 6am and set about cleaning up. I emailed the surveyor to confirm today was the day, but 9am turned to 10, then 11am, and I got no response. Finally, around noon I got a text from the surveyor. He’s in the hospital with congestive heart failure. The docs think a change in medication will help. Over the course of the afternoon, we worked out a path forward where I provide him with a list of everything I’ve done since his original survey in 2019, and an accredited associate of his will walk through the boat on Wednesday and confirm it all.

So, the goddess of the seas is apparently still messing with me and my Roamer. We might still splash this week.

That said, I mentioned previously that it’ll be handy to have a place to sleep aboard while I’m getting the boat prepped for its first voyage from Deale MD to the marina closest to my house. Over the 2022 winter, I suggested to the missus that the V-berth is in need of a mattress, and she enthusiastically took charge of that mission.

Step One: make a mattress cover that fits the goofy V-berth bunk

This bunk is for a single person, and it fits me just fine. It also fits the missus just fine. But it definitely won’t accommodate us both at the same time. Think of it as the place the loser of an argument gets to sleep while the winner gets the (future) aft cabin queen-size mattress.

Nice fit

8″ memory foam mattress at Costco was a bargain

It’s amazing how compact these foam mattresses are out of the box

The mattress comes with a cover, but the missus initially didn’t plan to use it.

Next day, the mattress was fully expanded

You can tell this was a project the missus was leading because she was the one who told me to put the mattress on the dining room table.

Lay out the cut lines with a fat Sharpie to match the missus’s mattress cover

I bought an electric bread knife specifically to cut this mattress and future cushions.

It took two passes with the bread knife before the first cut was done

Nice!

Laying out the next cut

We used the cut off scrap to make the opposite side corner. We’ll use contact cement to hold them together.

Kinda like that

After gluing the mattress parts together, we wrestled it into the cover the missus made

It was very difficult to get the foam mattress into her cover. It was as if the foam was grabbing ahold of the cover material and wouldn’t slide into place. But before cutting the mattress, we had noticed it was very easy to put the mattress back into its original cover. The foam didn’t stick to it. So the missus decided to convert the original mattress cover from a boring rectangle to the goofy shape of our V-berth bunk. Then we’d put the covered mattress into the missus’s custom one.