Lettuce and cold drinks — the frosting on the cruising cake
Issue 105 : Nov/Dec 2015
This past summer, for the first time in 15 years or more, we had ice in Mystic’s icebox. In years past, we cruised without ice because our vacation cruising took us too far from ports where resupply was possible. Our shorter weekend cruises could have started out (and finished) with ice, I suppose, but we really didn’t need ice for just a couple of days. Nothing could spoil that quickly.
So Mystic’s icebox — a cavernous space that a small person could easily hide inside — became the place for stowing all kinds of canned food, including jars and jars of meats we had canned ourselves. The top layer held my cameras, keeping them fairly close to the cockpit and yet off the seats, where they could slide from one side to the other or wind up bouncing off the sole when we tacked.
Our veggies hung in nets. I soon learned which ones lasted the longest: onions and potatoes, Napa cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Fruits such as oranges, grapefruit, and apples could also make it for a couple of weeks. Eggs don’t need to be refrigerated but do need to be protected from banging about, and were kept in a safe storage place beneath the galley sink.
In the summer of 2015, we skipped the long wilderness cruises and went instead for five-day weekends in the Apostle Islands near our home port. The reason for this was that we had two boats in the water. How could we spend any time at all on Sunflower, our trailerable C&C Mega 30, who was at Lake Minnetonka nearer our home, if we took a three-week Lake Superior vacation and any number of other shorter trips on Mystic, the C&C 30 we’ve sailed for decades?
Juggling boats, as it turns out, is not for the fainthearted and we won’t repeat that madness next summer. We needed additional time to test and tweak Sunflower before taking her on winter road trips, so we launched her close to home. But we couldn’t live another summer without Mystic, who sat out the summer of 2014. What to do? Launch both and start juggling: five days in the Apostles then a week at home with daysails aboard Sunflower. Repeat.
As a result of these shorter, more civilized, and less-wide-ranging voyages aboard Mystic, we rediscovered the true function of the icebox. What a breakthrough! Suddenly we had cold drinks, delicate lettuce varieties available for salads, and perishable fruit at the end of a long weekend that could never have held up for more than a day or two before. We had yogurt. Previously we made our own on board, but we had to eat it in its entirety within a day.
We had no-guilt meal leftovers! Previously, those had gone into omelets the next morning or into a soup by lunchtime. It required at least a bit of skill and planning . . . and sometimes some overeating. We had real meat, not the canned type that has the consistency of boiled beef that results from the canning process.
There’s a lot to be said for living with ice. As the newly reconverted, we’re noisily extolling the virtues of something every other sailor already knew.
That cavernous icebox is no longer filled to the brim with heavy cans and cameras. I found a new (not nearly as convenient) safe location for the cameras in the V-berth. The icebox contains just a few blocks of ice and a few days’ worth of food way down there at the bottom.
Most amazing of all, no longer outfitted for weeks of wilderness cruising, a newly lightweight Mystic floated on her lines once more.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
