EDITOR'S NOTE: This blog is no longer active.

The subject of cooking aboard grew from one column to two, and now to three. I didn’t intend to be a food and cooking columnist, but after a request for some recipes, I agreed to share a few of my favorites including comments referring back to some of my suggestions in my last two columns. Hereafter when a column is a little short I may take another recipe onto the end.

The recipes I will share today are for meadle, Grandma Linahan’s macaroni salad, and a complete chicken dinner cooked entirely on the grill thus avoiding heat in the cabin.

Meadle

My top-load freezer is actually a little easier to organize since I can stack like things in columns and have a pretty good view of the choices from the top layer. I keep meats to the left, vegetables to the right, and miscellaneous odds and ends in the middle. That seems to work for me. When I go to a warehouse store to replenish my stock I empty out the freezer so the newest food goes on the bottom.

If you live on your boat you either cook or you eat out a lot. Not so different from living in a house or an apartment, is it? Eating out quickly becomes expensive and is generally not as healthful as what you can make at home.

I’ve been having some health issues the last few months, so my apologies to readers waiting to hear from me. I’ll talk in a later column about living aboard and being ill.

This is the sort of article that often starts with a definition. The problem is that according to Webster, boathandling isn’t a word. In the boating and sailing communities, it is just one of those words that many people use and we are all just supposed to understand. We’ll just have to define it ourselves.

There are cruisers and there are racers, and never the twain shall meet.

Nah! That may be true for some, but not for me.

My first meaningful sailing experience was as crew on the dinghy racing team in college. If I recall correctly, there was little to no instruction and some amount of yelling and hitting in response to my mistakes. I can’t say it was fun necessarily, but something about those little boats really took hold.

I raced big boats a few times, but there were lots of better, more experienced sailors for that team.

There are people who live aboard boats who talk about simple lives. They talk about getting rid of extra possessions and achieving actualization from a lifestyle based on other measures of success than a more conventional consumer standard of living.

Somewhere there is a definition for the word "boat" that is "always something more to do." Back when I lived ashore, I had a similar list for the house. Most of those projects were somehow easier and faster.

I set some ground-rules about projects for myself:

1. Make sure I have a complete plan;

2. Make sure I have all the parts I need;

3. Make sure I will leave the boat in a sailable condition;

4. Only add projects that will make the boat easier to sail, more comfortable, or safer; and

Why do so many live-aboard boats never leave the slip? If you’re thinking about living aboard and love to sail, how do you avoid falling into the same trap? The answers are complex and likely unique to each of us. There are some commonalities that are worth thinking about.

Hello! My name Is Dave, and I’m a live-aboard. I’ll be using this space to talk about being a live-aboard and the special issues that I and others face as a result of our life-style.