I live in Valencia, Spain, and discovered PBO in a UK airport 15 years ago. I asked the newspaper shop near my home to order it in for me, and have been receiving it every month since then. Congratulations for such a fantastic magazine.

Now, after all this time, I have finally ‘invented’ something that I believe deserves to be published.

There is something I adore when at anchor in a lonely cove: a good bottle of wine. But there is also something with that, that I deeply hate: the tinkling of the bottles bumping into each other or, even worse, rolling into the bottom of a locker.

The combination of these two factors led me to design this bottle rack of neoprene, which takes hardly any space when empty, and which adapts perfectly to the number of bottles that we want to put in it, up to a maximum of 12.

I have three on the boat, one for white wine, another for red wine, and a third for various liquors.

How to make them

They are simply four rectangles of neoprene stitched together to form a honeycomb structure. The pictures (below) show how I did it.

1. From a piece of 3mm neoprene I cut two rectangles of 20 x 53cm, and two of 20 x 59.5cm.

1a. Four separate panels: two of each size

2. Draw lines 12-13cm apart, which is roughly half the circumference of your average wine bottle. Make the spaces slightly wider if you plan to store bigger bottles.

3. Stitch the ends of a long piece and a shorter piece of neoprene together (1). Repeat for the other pair. With the longer pieces next to each other, sew the two together along your first marked line (2). All four pieces are now joined.

4. Now pin and sew the first pair of strips along the next line (3). Repeat for the other pair and you’ll have created the first two pockets.

5. Continue stitching to alternately join the centre strips and outer strips to create new pockets.

6. Finally join the last two ends. Job done!