Cooking Options For Live-aboard Voyagers—Part 1, Electric

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Three months ago I did some experimenting with induction cooking and wrote about it. And that spawned four more articles as I investigated the changes to a cruising boat’s electrical system required to support high loads like those from electric cooking. So now we can properly answer the original question, is electric cooking practical on a yacht?

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Provisioning For Remote Voyaging, Part I

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A big part of preparing for an extensive northern trip such as the one we undertook this summer is provisioning. In this case, I had to provision for six months. Yikes!

A number of people have asked me how I go about doing this, so here goes.

Cool Gadget to Keep Your Frozen Food Frozen

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Here’s a simple easy-to-build gadget that will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your freezer, by circulating the air so the stuff at the top and farthest from the plates does not thaw, while the food at the bottom and against the plates remains frozen, particularly when the freezer is packed tight.

Trident Two-stage Propane Regulator, Problems

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The Problem

After two days going to windward on the same tack, returning from Svalbard (Spitsbergen) to Norway, our bilge gas alarm went off. We searched everywhere for the source to no avail until I opened the gas bottle locker to a very strong smell of propane.

A Propane Tank Gotcha

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JHH5II-10014-EditThis is a small FYI post about a big pain in the butt!

The gotcha started innocently enough with me blithely loading our propane tanks into the back of the car and driving to our local Canadian Tire to get them filled—as I had done with no problems in the past—prior to our heading south last fall (2010). However, this time the Propane Guy (PG) said, “I can’t fill them. They are more than 10 years old.” Either this was a new rule since we last had them filled in Canada (it has been in place in Europe for a while) or the PGs who filled them before didn’t check. Whatever.

Propane Tank Gotcha, Take Two

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Do you carry aluminum propane tanks like we do on “Morgan’s Cloud”? If so, you need to listen up as Phyllis shares some things about re-certifying and replacing them that we learned the hard way…$500 worth of hard way.

Kerosene (Paraffin) Cooker

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Back in the day, many offshore voyaging pioneers like the Pyes, Smeatons, and Hiscocks cooked on Primus stoves: Peculiar machines that relied on hand pumped air pressure to force kerosene (paraffin) into a burner that was preheated with metholated spirit (industrial alcohol). Tales abounded of flare-ups, singed eyebrows and sea-cooks totally traumatized by the unpredictable behaviour of these machines.

Cooking And Heating With Kerosene (Paraffin)

Reading Time: 3 minutes

[While living on Polaris for a month, I wrote about the boat’s kerosene stove (cooker), which sparked a lively debate in the comments about the benefits and drawbacks of various cooking fuels on boats.

Continuing that theme, we just got a note from our good friend and Norwegian Correspondent for the Norwegian Cruising Guide, Hans Jacob Valderhaug, who cruises extensively with his wife Eli Husum on their Hallberg Rassy 32, Anna. In fact they are bound for Svalbard as I write.

If you are thinking of kerosene for cooking and/or heating, what follows by Hans Jakob will be useful.]