Cooking Fuels: Wood

Wood stoves are an option, but lets be realistic for a moment. Wood stoves are popular in houses and campers, which are near land and trees where wood is found. On a boat, you are floating and all the trees are far away from you! 

Any wood you gather now needs to be brought back to the boat and stored somewhere! Where are you going to put all of this wood and keep it dry until you burn it? 

You might think that driftwood would be an excellent source of wood for the stove, but the problem is the wood is pickled with salt. This salt will escape while buring and combine with the high heat to rust out the inside of your stove in a very short amount of time. 

Wood stoves may sound cool at first, and will get the job done, but there is a serious logistical problem in getting the wood needed to the stove so that you can cook on it while cruising.  

If you liveaboard in a marina, this might not be a problem as you have ready access to land and all of its amenities, giving you the ability to find and store wood for your stove. 

Cooking Fuels: Alcohol

Alcohol stoves are not very popular thanks to the mainstreaming of propane stoves. Alcohol stoves burn at a cooler temperature, meaning that it takes longer to cook on them as compared to propane. Aside from this small detail, they do burn very cleanly, like propane, and also heat up quickly as well. You can easily start the stove and be cooking in a few minutes as the pan heats up rapidly.

Alcohol comes in two flavors, pressurized and wick. Pressurized alcohol stoves are a fire hazard and should be removed from the boat instantly. They are famous for causing massive flame flare ups that will set your interior ablaze and burn the boat to the waterline every time you use them! Wick alcohol stoves, on the other hand are very tame. 

The wick is soaked in alcohol and simply burns through a hole in the stove to reach the pan. The flame can even be blown out by a well directed puff of wind, like blowing out a candle. While the flame is not as hot as propane, so it will take slightly longer to cook, you are cruising and there is no rush! The meals are still prepared and we make dinner this way every night without ever feeling like "it is taking forever". 

Along the lines of having multiple fuels available, alcohol stoves are typically filled with Denatured Alcohol, but they can also be filled with paint thinner, as well as many other types of paint solvents that you can find in almost any hardware store. If you absolutely can not find any fuel for the stove, you can always setup a penny stove with diesel and have the flame rise through the hole in the stove to burn against the pan, allowing you the most versatility in cooking fuels around! 

Alcohol stoves may not be popular, but they are very simple to operate and maintain, making them a stove that will work well for you on a daily basis without complaints. 

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.