[Webmaster edit: moved this discussion from Yacht Club Bar as this is a better place - can be seen by site visitors too!]
Daniel Collins 25.2.2013
Any ideas on this, safe way to store bottles, half dozen or so.
A box in the bilge? Locker/rack on a shelf? What do you do for dedicated storage?
David Tyler 25.2.2013
The catch is that though there's a reasonably standard wine bottle size, some manufacturers feel the need to be different to stand out from the crowd. Whisky bottles in particular come in all shapes and sizes. My liquor locker has a removable divider with a base, and two fore and aft upright pieces of 5mm ply, 80mm apart, and I take my tape measure to the liquor store.
A good general principle for a top-entry stowage is to cut some strips of 5mm ply, 130mm wide, and half-joint them into a "noughts and crosses board" shape, as a removable insert to store nine bottles in a box. This works for glasses stowage, too.
For beer cans, use lengths of 65mm half round PVC house guttering, screwed down fore and aft to a horizontal surface inside a locker. A slightly larger size would work for bottles. Then you can make a pyramid of cans/bottles that won't rattle and roll.
Daniel Collins 14.3.2013
My boat has a vertical storage rack suitable for a few bottles under the galley dish drainer (lift the drainer and there's vertical access to a small pantry cubby - the liquor is on the bulkhead) but I prefer to store the daily-use stuff sideways in an otherwise useless too-thin top shelf of a bulkhead mounted bookshelf. It would rattle around but I pad the bottles with the free plastic liners you get when buying at the liquor store and save the liners for more bottles. Not all stores sell the liners so the other alternative is to sew a few large "koozies" that fit generic bottle sizes. A fiddle rail and a bronze searail (removable) keep two rows of bottles in place and I've only ever had a single one fall out because it was abnormally small.
I've been thinking about a design using a series of bottle-sized holes cut out of a 5mm sheet of ply, with 8mm or so dowels set in below the holes which extend in length just slightly short of a tall whiskey bottle's worth, ending at a slight down angle into another sheet of plywood. Insert the bottle horizontally and it rests on the dowels with the neck slightly out for identification, but must be lifted a few centimetres to extract. A few vertical battens between the rows can keep bottles from clashing, and the whole unit can then take the place of a shallow cubby, no door required.