Trampoline Saga. Part 1

I don't know how many parts there will be to this saga but I do know it will be more than one. Since we decided to spend some of our insurance money on putting trampolines on SweetHaven we have delved into the plethora of information and options out there on this topic. It's daunting, so many options but which one is right for us? 

It seems to come down to three things:

First, what you want aesthetically.

Second, what you need for safety.

And third, what you can afford financially.

Mark and I both sat down with each our own respective iPads and started googling about trampoline materials. I had one picture in my head, he had another. More often than not Mark and I never have the same visions when it comes to projects, but we do eventually make it all gel when we come together.

Mark heard trampoline and immediately thought of this stuff.

Trampoline mesh. Makes sense. The tightly woven, bouncy material your backyard trampolines have.

And some trimarans do use this stuff, usually the smaller, 12 foot kind though, not the cruising types.

I had envisioned this stuff.

Trampoline mesh, heavy duty. This is what you see on all the big catamarans out there. Fancy, smooth and white, with a bikini clad girl or two, sun bathing on them

I had priced out my material and Mark had the figures for his, of course mine was more expensive. The heavy duty mesh from sailrite.com is $53/yard and requires shelter-rite to go around the edges, grommets to string the rope through plus all the required tools to make grommet holes and so on.

For our needs of two, ten foot by ten foot (approximately) sized tramps, this would cost $600 to complete.

Our budget for trampolines was $700 so we were right at our limit, this estimate didn't include the hardware needed to actually attach it to the boat (mainly because we haven't decided how we are actually going to go about doing that.)

The regular trampoline mesh, with shelter- rite and grommets and so on would have come out to about $300 to complete, half the price but not appropriate for our kind of boat.

The white heavy duty mesh is pretty and popular on catamarans but since that option maxed our budget and since we aren't a cat but a trimaran, we decided to keep looking at what else was out there...

And we discovered net trampolines. Nets seem to be the most popular with trimarans our size. 

I was drawn to the pretty, white mesh options at first because it is nice looking and it is what I've seen the most around, but what looks the best isn't always the best. Safety comes first. 

Upon first purchasing Sweets I downloaded a book The Case for the Cruising Trimaran by Jim Brown, one of the forefathers of the cruising trimarans back in the 70's designing the Searunner trimarans.

In his book he of course, talks a lot about the concern most people have with trimarans, that they can flip, back over front, easier than any other kind of sailboat. And this is something to consider when installing trampolines on a trimaran. You want to have something that is light weight, but of course strong enough to hold you. You want something with small enough holes that your feet don't fall through when stepping on it but you want big enough holes for rapid water drainage. If your bow goes under a wave or has heavy splash up, the added weight on the bow could be a enough to flip her (in extremely rough conditions of course) but this needs to be a consideration.

This safety aspect immediately rules out the regular trampoline mesh, no drainage whatsoever there and for me, this ruled out the white heavy duty mesh too, it may be pretty and strong but the holes were only 1/8inch wide, I didn't feel that was enough.

So with both our original ideas ruled out now we moved on to investigating netting.

As I mentioned this is the most common kind of trampolines seen trimarans so naturally there was a lot of different options in netting too.

Some people we read up on just used fishing net, it was cheap and did the trick but I wanted something a bit more upscale than that, fishing net is rough and bumpy, not something you'd want to suntan on.

A search of trimaran specific netting lead us to what we have dubbed, the Oracle netting.

Ultra Cross, silver dyneema netting, the kind if material the racing trimaran Oracle has for their trampoline. 

Dyneema® is the strongest, lightest weight fiber ever made! Up to 15 times stronger than quality steel; up to 40% stronger than aramid fibers, both on weight for weight basis. 42mm BK designation is the measurement of the diamond when stretched or pulled tight. Single Mesh Breaking Strength is approx 765 Lbs. Twine diameter is approx 1/8in (3.1mm)

 It truly is awesome stuff, 15 times stronger than steel? Sheesh, if it's good enough for the Oracle then it's good enough for me. It met the criterial for looks, for safety but unfortunately not for our pocketbook. To do our two trampolines in this stuff would come out to $3000. No crazy steel like netting for us, I'm afraid.

 

After hours of looking we found a material that fit the bill in all areas. Hockey net. Woven, vinyl netting, 3mm thick cord, 2 inch diameter holes when stretched, breaking strength of 300lbs per strand, perfect. It looks prettier than fishing net, holes big enough for safely draining and cost $300 to outfit our boat. 

The materials have been ordered, next in the trampoline saga will be actually fabricating and installing them. Nothing like having the easy part behind you right?