Food/Cooking

After much agonizing, we finally made the decision to replace our Broadwater stove (cooker) that has given us so much trouble since we bought it seven years ago; mainly because the manufacturer seems to be, after several fits and starts, well and truly defunct.

During our recent refit we replaced Morgan’s Cloud ’s old cooker with a three burner model from Force10. Getting the new stove working properly and safely has not been easy.

This post will undoubtedly floor those of you who have read about our problems, some of them dangerous, with the Force10 stove. And I won’t kid you, we deeply and personally resent the time, effort and money expended over nearly two years that getting this stove working safely and properly has taken—it is simply not good enough in a premium product costing $1300.00.

This 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.

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.

[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.]