Headroom Project…Your input wanted

Lance has developed pretty good radar over the past 50 years that he has been 6’4”+. He usually does not get caught unawares with an unexpected head bash.

Of course, most of the places we hang out have 8’ ceilings and the doorways are plenty tall.

It wasn’t always that way. Our first apartment was in a basement. The bathroom was a little closet in the kitchen/living room/bedroom. You had to step into the kitchen area to wash your hands. There was a cast iron sewer line hanging from the ceiling right outside the bathroom door with a connection fitting that was in just the right (wrong?) place for a painful, middle-of-the-night wake-up.

Fortunately, that only lasted for a few months before we moved on, and we haven’t had to deal with the headroom situation. Until now.

Boats, especially boats right-sized for the loop, don’t generally have generous headroom.

As we discussed in a previous post, having a boat where Lance can stand fully upright is a very high priority.

In that post, we looked at how the number of boats in the intersection of Budget – Length – Headroom is, in our case, quite small.

Venn diagram
We’re looking for ~40′ and under $100K.

However, it occurred to me that other people may not have the same budget and length constraints, but may still be interested in seeing what we have found out about headroom as we walk through various boats.

Lance has been taking notes about the various boats we’ve been on, primarily at boat shows and boat brokerages.  I’ve started a spreadsheet to keep track of whether Lance, at 6’5” with shoes, has headroom to stand up straight on the various boats. The notes are simple, saying “yes” or “no” to the headroom question.

Access the google sheet to see what our experience has been.

To tell you the truth, we didn’t make notes about new boats or other boats that were clearly out of our price range, even if we went on them at the boat show. So, there may be some Ranger Tugs or American Tugs or others that we’ve missed. We’ll make a point of making notes in the future and add to the spreadsheet.

Here’s where you can help. I want to collect similar information from other tall folk. What is YOUR experience on various boats? I imagine you’ve been keeping your own list. Let’s combine the lists and have a useful resource! I am more interested in your personal experience on the boat than in the advertised headroom.

If you are at least 6’4” and have personal experience with headroom on some boats, send me a message either through Facebook, the comment section of the blog, or the comments on the google spreadsheet.

We’ll add your information to the spreadsheet as a service to future loopers.

Let’s do this thing!