Santa was kind to Two Lucky Fish. She needed an outdoor cooking appliance, and now she’s got it: A shiny new Magma Marine Kettle 2 combination stove and gas grill.

One surprise, however, is that Magma does not make mounts for any of the common downrigger plates many boats have. My boat has Scotty mounts, for instance, and I want to use these handy “hard points” for mounting things like…well…a barbecue. No such luck, at least not off-the-shelf.

OK, then…I guess I’ll just build it myself. Which I did.

There’s nothing particularly clever here…it’s four bolts and a piece of plastic (HDPE) lumber, combined with Magma’s surface deck socket mount (model A10-120, recently superseded by model A10-121). But heck, it seems to work. On Boxing Day we successfully boiled a teakettle of water and made hot tea for the whole family.

One issue: It’s too high. I’m not sure I’d want to flip pancakes or tend bacon at this height. So I may end up changing things around to place the kettle at a more suitable working height. Possibly I’ll come up with something really unpredictable such as “bending the rod”…brilliant!