John Lewis Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 3:57 PM Reply-To: tognews@googlegroups.com To: TOGnews eGroup We had the mystic stainless ladder which is pictured in the photos under Lumley. It was adequate for the job . It went into the water far enough that it was easy to climb onto it. Some swim ladders I have used do not extend far enough into the water. We sold it when we settled in Seattle since we did not expect to be doing much snorkeling in the Pacific North West. The disadvantages of this ladder, from my perspective, are: 1. It occupies the gate when folded up so you have to hope you get a slip where you can board from either side or on the side opposite the ladder. A few times we were in temporary slips in marinas where we had to board over the gate. Double fingered slips are very rare outside the US. Its a pain when you are bringing provisions on board. You could remove the ladder, I suppose, but then you would have to secure it somewhere so it did not disappear. . 2. We would frequently forget to pull the ladder up when getting under way. I suppose better seamanship could fix that problem but the fact was that we frequently did not realize that the ladder was still down until we heard it rattling. Pulling it up while the boat was moving was a real pain or impossible depending on boat speed.. 3. Actually, pulling it up when the boat was not moving was a pain, too. A few of our guests could not do it. 4. Having the ladder mounted on the genoa track restricted where the fairlead car could be positioned on the side of the boat where the ladder was mounted. That was an issue while we had a 110 genoa but not after we replaced with with a yankee. 5. I had to rig up some bungee cords to keep the head sail sheet from getting caught under the ladder. If we were to get a new ladder it would be one like Acaia or Rhode van 42 show in their photos. We would install it so it would swing aft and be mounted on the aft side of the gate so it did not block the gate at the dock. If it swings up aft it would be easy to pull up with the boat moving forward. This design would also be a lot easier to deploy and retrieve when the boat is stationary. We saw several boats with this type of ladder in our travels and were always a little bit jealous of how easy it was for them to get their ladders up and down. The design on Stray Cats would be OK, too. The only issue we would have with that design, on our boat, is that access over our stern is constrained by our radar arch, outboard and its crane. Whatever design you get make sure the ss steps are very wide or there are teak or, even better, plastic treads on the ss tubing. Its also convenient if the ladder is far enough away from the boat that you can stand on the bottom rung with fins on. That way you have something to stand on when pulling off your fins. The biggest benefit of the plastic treads was that we were unafraid to use aggressive rust removers on the ladder. Those chemicals would be too hard on teak. John s/v Active Transport Seattle