One of the most useful components of a cruising sailboat is an arch on the stern. They can carry solar panels, your dinghy, and a multitude of other things. And of course our new boat didn’t come with one so we need to install it ourselves! On our first boat we had an arch custom built. It was beautiful but expensive and took forever. For this boat we didn’t feel like messing with it so we bought a kit from Atlantic Towers. You just pick the width you need and straight or offset and then figure out where it bolts. Sounds easy right?

We lucked out and Atlantic Towers was located like 3 hours north of Tilghman so Jason took the truck up there one day to pick it up and save on shipping while I stayed on the boat to do more work.

We started by drilling and bolting on the connector piece in the middle after much consternation over how wide the entire thing really needed to be.

Now that the arch is essentially one piece we cut the legs to fit the angle of the transom of the boat. (After a lot of measuring and discussions of course!)

After the ends are cut to length, we installed the end flange fittings after a test fit to get the angles right so they would bolt down flat.

Now it’s ready to install! We hoisted it onto the back of the boat with the halyard (and scratched up our transom more than I care to admit). The upper attachment points were next to the rear back stays on the rigging so that area was really strong but not flat on the backside for the backing plates. We had to go in and reinforce the area with epoxy and aluminum so that the arch would have a nice flat surface to bolt to.

It’s hard to get a sense of how large the arch looks on the boat with it out of the water but it’s even with the boom and should be very functional.
We bought the davit extensions that bolt on to life the dinghy up further away from the transom but due to the angles we ended up with on the arch we don’t think we’re going to need them! That simplifies things a lot for us.
We also ran into a few issues. The first is that none of the hardware stores in the Annapolis area sell 316 stainless steel fasteners. And we looked everyyywhere. So soon we’re going to have to replace all the bolting hardware to upgrade it from the 304 stainless we ended up finding. That’s really shitty because that means we have to completely uninstall the arch and that final install included some nylon washers that were a total pain to shove in there. The second issue is that the lower attachment points for the arch bolt to the transom in an area that’s just thin fiberglass. It flexes more than we’re comfortable with with just Jason hanging on it so we’re going to install some beefy reinforcement back there once we get to Florida and can dig into it again.
Either way, we now have an arch on the boat and can start installing our solar panels onto it!