Cooking Fuels: Diesel

Yes, diesel stoves and ovens are a thing. They work by burning diesel and heating up a cast iron stove top. The iron becomes hot and heats up everything around it. This will include your food, as well as the air and everyone in the cabin! 

Diesel stoves also take a while to heat up, usually around 20-60 minutes and several hours to cool down once the fire has been put out. In cooler climates, this is a great way to heat the cabin as well as prepare the meals, but in warmer climates, it means that the cabin will turn into an oven for the next several hours! 

Diesel stoves have the pleasure of using a very obtainable fuel source, as everyone uses diesel for their motors around the world! These stoves can also be adjusted to burn all sorts of other oils, such as kerosene and heating oil. This makes these stoves very versatile, but they do produce a lot of accessory heat in the cabin. 

Cooking Fuels: Butane

Small single burner camp stoves are popular as an affordable and temporary cooktop while you start out cruising. They are cheap and effective, letting you eat and go cruising now without having to wait until you can afford a more expensive stove and oven.

These small camping stoves usually use propane, but some run on butane. The small can of butane will clamp into the stove and burn away as you cook your meals in the comfort of your cabin. The entire unit is self contained and fits into small spaces when stored and not in use. 

We met a cruiser who was using this type of stove on his Cape Dory 22. It worked well for him, but he did have one problem with it: he couldn't get the fuel! In his home town, the fuel was plentiful and readily available from most hardware stores. Then he left his home town and could no longer find the cans that his stove required. He discovered that Wal-Mart carried them from time to time, so he was forced to find a Wal-Mart in every port he stopped in and would search for the butane cans. If they had them, he would buy all the cans they had in stock. If they didn't have them, he would ration his remaining cans until he could find more. 

Cruising for him was carefree and fun, except with his cooking fuel. Searching for butane was a constant stress for him, as he was never sure when he would find more and was never certain if he would be able to cook in a month! 

If you are choosing a fuel to cook with, make sure it is something that is universally obtainable and doesn't require any proprietary parts to operate. 

Cooking Fuels: Propane

It seems that the holy grail of cooking fuels on a boat, according to most cruisers, is propane! It can be fed into a stove/oven that is gymbaled, allowing you to cook effortlessly while underway and bake dinner evenly without fear of burning anything. Propane is a favorite as it burns cleanly and lights instantly. 

The problems with propane are the cost of filling your tanks, the methods to store it, and any leaks it might have in your boat. 

Propane sinks, so if it leaks out of its tank or any of the lines to the stove, it could potentially sink into the bilge. The next spark that occurs will blow the boat to splinters! To avoid this, propane is always stored in lockers that have a drain overboard and no communication with the rest of the boat. This lets any fumes vent overboard and away from the bilge. 

Propane is stored typically in metal cans, and metal on an ocean going yacht is going to rust! They do make composite tanks that are impervious to rust, but many filling stations do not trust them and will not fill your tank. 

Aside from storing the propane, you also need to worry about getting it into your tank! Sadly, the valves used on the tanks are not universal, so if you plan on doing international cruising, you might find it difficult to get the station to adapt to your valve and fill your tank. 

Lastly, there is typically an electronic solenoid that cuts off the fuel flow of propane to the stove. You need to have a manual way of bypassing this solenoid so that if the solenoid were to fail, you will still have the ability to cook and eat well while cruising. 

Propane has its drawbacks, but luckily it seems to be such a popular fuel that everyone has it and has worked the kinks out of the system. This means that someone in your anchorage will probably know how to repair the system and have parts that you might be missing to get your cooking going again. 

Taking Advantage of Winters Stretch

Dyneema has a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, meaning that it expands as it cools. When you tune your rigging for summer sailing, it will become rediculously slack in the winter. This is known as "Winters Stretch" and can be used to your advantage! 

During the year, thimbles and clevis pins will move and shimmy while you sail. They are under tremendous tension and there is no way possible for you to push them back into place without untying the stay and then retensioning it. You need to untie everything to remove the tension on the stay, but in winter, the tension is removed as the stay elongates temporarily! 

When your rigging goes slack, you are presented with the opportunity of the year to push everything back into place and line it all up perfectly! That thimble that rotated a bit when you set up your rigging can now be spun vertically with ease. That clevis pin that spun around and has the cotter pin upside down can now be rotated to line the cotter pin head up and keep it from falling out. 

All of these little jobs that would take hours to perform and correct in the summer can be accomplished in a few minutes with no tools, all thanks to the chilling effects of winter. 

Synthetic Standing Rigging in the Cold

As the temperatures plummet, we have found ourselves trapped in cooler weather while we dream of warmer sailing. We have a few options ahead of us, one is to re-tension the rigging for the cold weather and sail along as normal; the other is to work with the slack rigging and make our way towards warmth as quickly as we can! 

If we were going to be doing high latitude cruising in the winter, then yes, re-tuning the rigging would be a wise choice to make as it will facilitate safe sailing with sound standing rigging. The thing is, we are heading towards warmer latitudes and if we tighten the rigging, we would immediately need to loosen it again as it would contract in the warmth. 

This leads us to our decision to follow the second option: deal with it. 

While the rigging is slack, the biggest concern comes in the form of shock loads. When you jibe accidentally, the loads are greatly increased because the sails slam from one side to the other and yank the rigging along the way. When the rigging is tight, the transfer of force is rather mundane, but when it is slack, the loads go from non-existent to out-of-this-world in a fraction of a second. This shock load can lead to a lot of gear failure and ruin a cruise! 

Dealing with it is rather simple. First, no accidental jibes. Second, don't fly much sail. The loads come from the sails being flown. If you fly small sails, then you won't be stressing the rigging very much. This means that we reef very early and usually sail under canvassed. Third, pick downwind courses.  

Sailing downwind is a great way to reduce the stress on the rigging. Everything moves along nicely as the backstays take up the majority of the loads. The apparent wind is also greatly reduced and you can sail towards your desitnation even faster than if you were beating with slack rigging. 

Running towards warmer weather will get you there in a short period of time, this means that soon, your rigging will warm up and you can stop worrying about it being slack as it will tighten back up on its own as it warms again. 

Our rigging is tuned for 80F, and works well all the way down to 60F. We have found ourselves lately in temperatures ranging from 40F to 50F, so we can't wait to be in warmer weather once more!