Yep, that’s right. No refrigerator. Not even a built in icebox. We have a 50 quart Yeti cooler sitting on the settee, currently with the last bit of cool water sloshing in the bottom and a few last dairy products that will get eaten today or tomorrow. Here’s an overview of our food storage schedule thus far:

Day 1 – The day before departure from a city or village that sells ice, we buy a bag and take it out to the boat. We return to town and buy our groceries which includes our cold food such as cheese, yoghurt, bacon, sausage, cream cheese, butter, and veggies.  If we feel like we’re deserving, maybe a six-pack of frosty beverages will find its way into the cart.

One thing I would like to advise my readers is that If you are planning on traveling to far of places, I would suggest you to carry portable refrigerators or use commercial refrigeration – Habco.

Day 2 – The morning before we depart, we’ll row in and buy another bag of ice, since the first bag is really a sacrificial lamb to cool down the cooler and the food items. Unfortunately we can’t put that sacrificial lamb on the grill and whip up cabrito tacos a few days into the journey.

Day 3 – The beer’s long gone, the first bag of ice is melted but the second one is going strong. We’ll usually drain the water at this point and Wylie gets to drink from the cool, nutritious waters of Yeti falls.

Day 4- We’re still eating like kings, cheese and butter on everything, and we lap it up like wolves, knowing our days of rich, milky products may be numbered.

Day 5 – We’ve eaten egg, bacon and cheese tacos on boatmade flour tortillas every morning so far. Life is good. But the ice is just about melted now.

Day 6 – The inside of the Yeti is still cool, the cold water from the second bag of ice neatly captured in a tupperware to suck away the last bit of heat that finds its way in. All meat products are gone, but hardier cheeses, butter, sauces and the like live on. Visit DCWCasing.com to choose best packaging for the meat products while travelling.

Day 7 – The thrill is gone. We drain the water into Wylie’s jug, remove all the food and give the cooler a good cleaning. After that, the food items go back in, and we now have a very expensive, well insulated pantry for the remaining cheese, butter, veggies etc. At this point, we use our common sense and are more cautious about cooking any suspect foods that we still have. The lid stays cracked for ventilation, and we’ve had great success not losing food to rot.

Depending on our destination, we may keep sailing out in the wilderness for another week or two, living on dried goods, canned foods, and a lot of fish.

It takes patience to deal with ice. In fact, we actually feel a bit of relief when the ice is gone because we don’t have to tend to it any longer. The bacon, the beer, and the cream cheese are great, and we gorge ourselves, and we enjoy it immensely while we have it, but the dried times are great as well. We have been making some down right gourmet meals from the dry larder, and we’re not sacrificing our cuisine much if at all. It simply requires a different approach. A shipping container freezer sounds like a good idea for it.

Oh yeah, and we didn’t have to spend a grand on a fridge unit, and we didn’t have to add another battery to feed the machine, and we don’t have to run the engine to charge the battery to run the fridge. This is not to say that we’ll never have a fridge someday, or that we don’t sometimes wish we had one right now. But for our meager budget, and simple way of life, we’re making it work just fine.

As we stumble across good recipes that don’t require cold food, we’ll post them to the site.

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