A Voyaging Galley

 

 

Credit: Janette Watson

 

There are two things to bear in mind when organising your voyaging galley: one is that it must be able to be turned upside down and shaken vigorously; the second is that when you’re cooking, you need your food, tools, pans and condiments available without needing to open doors with floury, oily or sticky hands. Unfortunately, these two factors are mutually exclusive and worse, the former is the more important. The ability to be turned upside down and shaken may never be put to the test and makes for an ergonomically unsatisfactory arrangement when you’re doing much more than basic cooking. On the other hand, a knockdown that results in food, tools, pans and condiments scattered all over the boat, is at best a dreadful mess to clear up and at worst, dangerous to both crew and vessel.

The average kitchen in anything larger than a studio flat, has worktops galore, with tools, gadgets and containers placed strategically around. The cook will merely have to reach out a hand or take a step sideways to pick up anything that she needs. On an otherwise superbly well-found and seaworthy boat, the cook’s job is often one of endless frustration. Her mate, watching her rummaging through lockers while trying to stop vegetables from rolling onto the galley sole, will smugly suggest getting out all that she needs before she starts cooking. ‘That’s what I always did,’ he says, ignoring the fact that his idea of cooking is to open a couple of cans and spoon some rice into a pan. In harbour. This is patently impossible advice to follow in anything of a seaway; in harbour, mise en place results in counters covered with stout, seamanlike containers and no room to work. While there’s no way around the essence of the problem, it can be alleviated to a certain extent with careful organization and some joinery work. Often, of course, you have the galley the boat came with, but you may be able to use some of the following ideas to make life easier.

While galleys on production boats are being given more attention than used to be the case, many voyagers are not sailing new or custom-built boats; they have to take what they’re given, which is often barely adequate. Typical installations have few, if any drawers and minimal locker space, and what there is, is frequently crowded with piping. It’s a disconcerting prospect for the cook, used to her well-equipped kitchen ashore, but need not daunt her so long as everyone agrees on the importance of good food. Vegetarians tend to be interested in food and enjoy cooking and the galley should enable you to do this job with the minimum of problems and the maximum of pleasure. Above all, this should be the case at sea, when good food is so important, particularly in bad weather when morale can be low.

The first thing about a galley is that it should be as big as possible.   If your galley is very small, you may be able to improve the situation by adding a folding worktop or compromising on chart table use. The latter is very difficult to arrange to everyone’s satisfaction and should be avoided if possible. Generally, the chart table is on the opposite side of the boat from the galley and the presence of the cook, dodging from one side to the other will be a great irritation to all concerned. Admittedly, a folding worktop may be insufficiently substantial to fall against underway, but most of the time, you’re cooking at anchor, when the extra work surface will be appreciated, and its strength not an issue. If conditions at sea are less than ideal, don’t use it. A long work surface is the ideal and indeed, the option of being able to fit a long fore and aft counter is a considerable argument in favour of an athwartships cooker. A long counter enables you to dish up more than one serving at a time, it allows you to put plates down, to get out what you need to make a meal, to prepare vegetables, to roll out pastry and to make bread. It gives room for crockery and pans and allows you to spread yourself out when you want to cook something a bit special. It also means that there is plenty of locker space underneath. A fore and aft counter works well at sea, where cabbages, onions, potatoes and all the other inconveniently spherical vegetables, can roll about without attaining sufficient impetus to hurdle the fiddle onto

the cabin sole. A further advantage of the fore and aft counter is that it often allows you to install a row of lockers along its outboard side. These need be neither high nor deep, but will be excellent for ready-use containers of tea, coffee, dried milk, lemon juice, tomato purée, soya sauce, baking powder, jam, yeast, etc, along with your most-often used pots of beans, rice and pasta. This avoids the annoyance of having to rummage under the settee, each time you want to make a meal, and avoids the infuriating irritation of top-opening lockers.

Top-opening lockers are probably the worst offender in most stowage arrangements. They’re also probably the most difficult to alter. These are fitted to most boats and are frankly an abomination. You can’t get out everything in advance and the situation gets worse as the cooking progresses, with several pans about and the cooker too hot to use for a work surface. The pans need juggling because you only have two burners and eventually you move one off the cooker and put it down in order to add some tomato purée, only to realise that you’ve put it on the locker that contains the tomato purée. This happens all the time if you have top-opening lockers. The cure is to eliminate the top-opening lockers, where possible, or to add additional stowage to minimise the number of occasions your need to access them. Top-opening lockers are often fitted in corners that are otherwise difficult it get into and to organise. In fact, you can usually set them up so that you can access at least a quarter of the area without too many issues, althought you'll end up spending a lot of time on your knees.  The farthest recesses can be used for longer term stowage or for items used only in harbour, where emptying half the contents is less of an issue. 

Drawers are wonderful things and you need at least three. Six are better and should be possible in a stack under most counters. Be ruthless and tear out another locker if you don’t have any. Cutlery is much better kept in a proper drawer and so are your cooking tools. They can share a drawer, if necessary and life can be made easier if you buy a plastic separator for the tableware. This can be mounted on battens at the top of the drawer and slide back out of the way to give access to the cooking tools underneath. If you’re starting from scratch, make a shallow drawer just for cutlery. A third drawer is needed for tea towels. Ensure that the corners of drawers are filleted in order to make it easier to keep them clean.  Plates, bowls and glasses also keep nice and secure in drawers; however, it's often difficult to impossible to match dinner plates to the drawer size available, especially these days, when they are all so big.

I’ve done a bit of thinking about sinks on boats and would now choose a sink which can be filled with quite a lot of water for washing vegetables or doing a bit of laundry, and have a smaller bowl for washing up. The large sink enables you to have a good wash up of pans occasionally while the smaller bowl saves wasting water. The bowl also lets you wash up in a more convenient place, if your sink is a bit awkward to get at underway. I like to use fresh water for dishes whenever possible, and even if you’re using seawater, you don’t want to waste fuel heating up large quantities. After years of living afloat, I am insanely frugal with water: my present arrangement allows me to use a stainless steel bowl, whose rim sits on the edge of the sink.  This means that I can soak pans and give them a preliminary scrub before washing them: the soaking water can be poured down the sink beside the bowl.  I don’t see much advantage in having two sinks – the space wasted in both stowage and counter space is too heavy a price to pay for the putative advantages of a second sink. A very small sink can be an irritation and if space is seriously at a premium, I’d abandon the sink altogether. A self-draining sink normally requires a seacock, but is an advantage in cold, damp places because the water drained from spaghetti disappears before steaming up the galley. How much time do you plan to spend cooking spaghetti in cold, damp places? It does, however, allow you to fit an overflow from your water collecting system. A sink that needs pumping out is hardly an inconvenience and has the advantage of never inadvertently dumping your precious hot water, when you catch the plug.  On odds, I prefer a self-draining sink, but only if the outlet can be above the waterline.  Then the seacock is merely for reassurance and you don't need to keep opening and closing it. The chopping boards that so many boats have fitted over the sink, strike me as nonsense, for anything other than the preparation of a quick, cold snack. Whoever cooked a meal without using the tap several times during the process? Even if the faucet swivels, it’s unlikely to be high enough for you to slide a pan under. I believe that these chopping boards are provided simply to give the illusion of more counter space. Incidentally, there’s a lot to be said for having a couple of chopping boards, a big one and a small one, if you have the room.  I prefer wooden ones, myself, but each to her own.

While on the subject of sinks, I should mention water. Pressurised water is a luxury that voyagers are recommended to eschew. It’s another ‘system’ to maintain and encourages wasted water while using scarce electricity. I prefer hand pumps; many people swear by foot pumps. They both have the advantage of doling out water in regular quantities, very often at a convenient 1/4 cup at a time. This is a wonderful attribute when cooking underway, because it means you can pump out the amount of water required, without using a measuring jug. Obviously, where hands are at a premium (busy holding cook or equipment in place), this is a great boon, as well avoiding wasting water. To augment your supply of fresh water, you should consider arranging a way of collecting rainwater. Often pipes are let into the deck at the lowest point and the rainwater can flow into these. You must make sure that the deck in scrupulously clean and the salt rinsed out of the sails, first. I’d also recommend fitting a couple of filters in the system, so that your tanks stay clean. However well sluiced your decks are, over the years, a considerable amount of dirt will find its way into the tanks, to be stirred up when you sail to windward. Personally, I find my sundowner loses its savour when it has a centimetre of sludge in the bottom of the glass. Simple alternatives, much less likely to add sludge to your tank, are to fit an ‘elephant’s trunk’ into a bimini top, or simply to have a large sheet of canvas with grommets around the edges. This can be stretched out in such a way that the water it collects can be fed into a bucket and siphoned into your tank. It could also be used to channel water from the mainsail.

While fresh water tanks have their space in the scheme of things, particularly in boats with deep bilges, I would much prefer to keep my water in jerricans. They’re infinitely easier to keep clean; you can readily assess your consumption and you can keep dubious water separated from good stuff. I strongly recommend fitting a water filter to improve its taste for those occasions when you get chlorinated water from on shore.  If you don't have space under the sink for one of these, a filtering water jug can be a boon.  You can even buy indvidual bottles with an inbuilt filter.  In some ways these last two are better, because you only need to use them when the water doesn't taste very good and so the filters last longer and there's less plastic to dispose of.

And while on the subject of water, it’s well worth having seawater on tap. If you have a seacock for the engine, you can plumb into that. Another option is to have a separate small tank for salt water. On Badger, I had a 10 l (2½ gall) jerrican under the sink, with a pump piped into it and I've done the same on FanShi.  Readily available seawater ekes out your fresh water and if it’s easy to use, you will use it: for washing vegetables or your hands, for cooking and rinsing out the sink. I even use it for brushing my teeth.  With a separate tank, you have the advantage of a few days' supply of clean water if you are somewhere where the water is a bit silty or dubious.

Whether you’re moving your kit from a house, or are starting from scratch, it’s worth while spending a bit of time and effort over containers. All yachties seem to have a fetish about good quality plastic containers, preferably obtained very cheaply or free. (The ideal is something that came already filled and can be used for years after.)  When you're cooking for two people, you need a score or so of about 1 l (1 qt) capacity, which will be used for beans, sugar, dried fruit, popcorn and so on. In addition, you’ll want some of about 2.5 l (2½ qt) for food such as rice, pasta, oats and muesli. A 10 l (10 qt) is very useful for flour if you make your own bread, and if you can find the space for it. These are your working containers for day-to-day use, and if you can get these first, it makes it easier to organise your galley around them. Quite often, the lockers provided under the worktop have only one or two shelves about 600 mm (2 ft) apart. This is very wasteful of space and it’s worth building in shelves to fit your containers. Obviously, they need a fiddle to stop everything sliding out when you open the door, but it need not be as high as those fitted in an open shelf. It’s also worth fitting one or two internal fiddles so that you can put things back where they came from each time. All this is the ideal, of course, and not possible unless you already have the containers organised and to hand.

In addition to your working containers, you will want containers for longer-term supplies. 2.5 l (2½ qt) is a good size for many things such as beans, dried fruit, seeds and so on. Rice is probably best kept in 5 l (5 qt) ‘jerricans’. You often acquire these when buying vinegar, meths and so on; lentils, split peas, bulgur wheat, popcorn and several other things will all stow satisfactorily in these. Again, study the stowage space available and, try to get a variety of containers that will use this space efficiently.  If you are cadging them, this isn't hard!

A boat’s shape makes the best use of lockers problematical. Instead of having nice right angles, they’re full of curves and bumps that encourage everything to fall over. Smaller containers can fill some of the gaps, but they’re more of a nuisance to fill when stocking up. If shelves need internal framing, fit this under rather than above so that it doesn’t ‘trip up’ your containers, although it can double up as a fiddle on the inboard edge.

If possible, I recommend filleting all corners. This can be done with epoxy, smoothed in and painted with everything else, if you won’t need to remove the shelves again. Alternatively, there are products used in domestic decorating that can be moulded into a smooth curve. This makes it a lot easier to keep things clean. Paint the insides a light colour: I made the massive mistake of varnishing all my lockers on Badger. Admittedly, they did look beautiful, but were absolutely Stygian and I had to find things by touch. Light lockers reflect the light and because they show the dirt, you’re more likely to keep them clean. Gloss paint is much better than satin, in this respect.

If your galley is completely inadequate and you’re planning to rebuild it, it’s worth considering an athwartships cooker. I’ve lived for several years with both types, swinging and fixed, and I much prefer the latter, in spite of its obvious drawbacks.

The advantages of an athwartships cooker are:

• They allow for the long counter mentioned above. (A gimballed cooker needs a lot of space to swing, space that would otherwise be useful and accessible storage.
• The athwartships cooker frees up more useful counter space. (Athwartships counters allow things to slide down to leeward and fitting extra fiddles breaks up your workspace.)
• In heavy weather, when even the best of gimbals can be put out of action and you are strapped into your galley strap, you aren’t to leeward of an athwartships cooker. Any hot pans or boiling liquids that come away from their proper place will end up on the cabin sole and not on the cook. Indeed, I’m not sure that this isn’t the overwhelming advantage.  
• Although food is more likely to spill where the cooker doesn’t swing, I was happier deep-frying on my fixed cooker, than I on a swinging one, in spite of the fact that it was beautifully damped and had a substantial crash bar. I think that unconsciously, I still had a horrible expectation of inadvertently leaning on it.  I don't deep fry at all any more.
• With an athwartships cooker, you don’t need a crash bar, which can make it more awkward to clean and/or light the cooker. (If you have a gimballed cooker, it’s essential to fit one, so that if the boat lurches and the cook falls towards the cooker, she will not hit and tilt it, spilling boiling food.) 
  

The advantages of a gimballed cooker are:

• The oven works at sea. (With a fixed cooker, anything put in the oven at sea is likely to spill, or to come out looking rather peculiar. This can be alleviated by putting the shelf in at angle, which more or less matches the boat’s angle of heel. The other side of the coin is that when you open the oven door, the cooker doesn’t tilt towards you.)
• A gimballed cooker obviously provides a great worktop at sea and is convenient for putting things down, but this role can equally well be played by a swinging shelf (q.v.).
• With a gimballed cooker, you don’t need to worry about your food spilling out of pans and such things as fried eggs are easier to cook underway.
• There is less need for pan clamps and you don’t need to think ahead so much about which pan to use.

Most boat cookers only have two burners and sooner or later, this brings up the problem of putting down a very hot pan. Unless you have metal work surfaces, there is nowhere apart from the sink for them to go, so it’s worth anticipating this by providing a tiled area. Small tiles are better than large ones here; not only are they easier to fit in the space provided, but they’re less likely to crack and less noticeable if they do. Dark grout does not stain as badly as light colours.  An alternative is a hardwood grating.

A good vegetable locker is essential if you are serious about your voyaging. Being able to eat fresh fruit and vegetables on a long passage, makes everything much more pleasurable. Your locker may be a large one subdivided, or several small ones. Keep it only for fresh produce. It needs to be as cool as possible and as well ventilated as is feasible. Below the waterline is the ideal stowage, if you can guarantee to keep bilge water away. If possible, insulate the hull (when the boat is heeled, the sun may bear directly on it) and deckhead and try to provide sufficient stowage for a minimum of 8 k (20 lb) potatoes and the same of onions, 3 k (5 lb) carrots, 3 large cabbages and 30 oranges. Bell peppers, that other voyaging necessity, should be bought green and, if possible, strung up in a suitable place (q.v.). If you can provide room for extras such as tomatoes, squash and so on, all the better.

When you’ve finished cooking, the pans should have a dry, easily accessible locker that can be reached even when the cook is strapped in. If possible, avoid having to stack your pans, which makes life unnecessarily difficult underway.

Pans are not as big as they seem to be – even a pressure cooker often only needs 180 mm (7 in) of height, less if you stow its lid elsewhere. (This incidentally, is not a bad idea, because the pressure cooker lid is always a nuisance when it’s hot, and if it has its own stowage, it can be put away safely.) You may well find an area of dead space under the cooker, which will make an excellent pan locker. Ideally, make it so that your most-frequently used pans are the easiest to get. They can be held in place with little fiddles and it’s worth making a space to fit each pan. Short handles will make stowage easier to arrange.

You can’t prepare food properly without sharp knives and, if stored with the other cutlery, these are a hazard to fingers, as well as losing their edge. Provide a rack for them. This can be something as simple as a piece of wood with slots cut in it, screwed to a bulkhead, or a proper knife block secured to the counter. Inside a locker door can also be a good place to keep them.

Because your voyaging boat is your home, it’s worth taking trouble over ‘dedicated’ stowage for glasses and crockery. They are much more pleasant to use and easier to clean than plastic.

If you enjoy your sundowner – and what voyager doesn’t? – suitable stowage for glasses is necessary. If you have stemware, they can hang in the sort of rack that is used in pubs and bars. If you have plenty of drawers, one or two can be divided up for tumblers. A locker on the bulkhead is also a fine way of stowing them. If buying from new, it’s worth making sure that your glasses are a ‘standard’ diameter, so that when you need to replace them, the new ones will fit the old stowage. 

Plates, bowls and mugs need good stowage and drawers work surprisingly well. The old-fashioned lockers with the T-fronts work well, although they’re not very easy to clean and can be a bit wasteful of space. If you’re making them, ensure they fit round ‘standard-sized’ plates, etc. This standard varies a bit with fashion, so be aware of this before choosing your crockery. Vertical plate racks seem like a good idea, but if fitted athwartships, the plates tend to roll noisily with the boat and if fitted fore and aft, they will rattle and roll as soon as you remove a couple for dinner. It should be possible to find room for horizontal stowage, even if it means encroaching into the top of a locker. A locker with a door on it always looks tidier.

You will undoubtedly be using a reasonably large selection of herbs and spices on a regular basis. While the natty little jars that you buy in supermarkets are compact and attractive, they’re often awkward to refill and difficult to spoon from. You’ll need at least 20, so if space is at a premium, you might be better off with smaller ones, filling them more often from larger bulk containers. In this intance, plastic might be better than glass, because you can then leave them 'out'.  If you get knocked down, the little plastic jars will come to no harm and be easy to pick up again.  Herbs and spices most definitely do not want to be in a top opening locker. The pepper mill also needs to be very accessible; salt less so, you will often be using seawater.

Tea towels need a decent berth where they can hang to dry and not get in the way. Over the oven door is not always satisfactory, (especially if you don’t have an oven!); hooks can usually be provided near the crash bar, outboard of an athwartships cooker or on a bulkhead.

A galley strap is an essential. When you’re working in the galley, you’re concentrating on other things and often have your hands full. An unexpected lurch can easily lead to an unpleasant bruise if not worse. Securely held in a strap, you have both hands free and can work more comfortably. Ideally, it keeps you close to the cooker, but has enough slack to allow you to reach most of what you need. A quick release clip is useful, because you will undoubtedly take it on and off several times while preparing a meal. A strap made of 75 mm (3 in) webbing is much more comfortable than one made from rope because the idea is to sit on it; not use it as a waist strap.

Counter tops need to be easy to clean and if possible, it’s worth filleting all edges so that they don’t become crud traps. Melamine is popular, but does eventually scratch and stain. Tiles are unsuitable for kneading bread and rolling pastry and encourage breakages, although a tiled area for hot pans, as mentioned, is very useful.  Varnished wood is surprisingly suitable, if the varnish is good-quality polyurethane. This is very heat resistant, doesn’t stain (or more accurately, doesn’t show stains), and scuffs and scratches are easily repaired with another coat of varnish.

In an ideal world, a galley has an opening porthole for the emptying of teapots and the disposal of biodegradables.  Failing this, a small slops container is a Good Thing to have, because it saves putting compostables into the rubbish bin. Rubbish bins themselves are rarely given the consideration they merit and it’s worth fitting one in a secure spot, easily accessible.  It won't need to be very big, because these days we can usually recycle a lot of stuff.  Indeed its worth having a locker (in the cockpit?) for these, so that it's easy to collect them up and take them ashore.  The stuff from the rubbish bin - usually some sort of plastic - can be popped into a bag and taken to a bin. 

A final suggestion to keep sweetness and light in the galley, is the provision of a swinging shelf. This is an asset at any time, but particularly if you have a fixed cooker. The simplest is essentially a fully fiddled tray, pivoted in the centre of the athwartships ends and ballasted: put some lead in a box fastened to the underside of the tray, on the fore-and-aft axis. As well as being a useful place for cups, glasses, plates, etc, a swinging tray provides a safe berth for a pan full of hot food, and to this end is worth tiling. The only drawback of such an amenity is that it’s so useful that it’s always full and you constantly wish it were a lot larger!  If your boat is small, you may find that this sort of shelf takes up too much space.  As long as the boat is relatively stiff, you can make a sort of grating that will hold cups and jugs from slipping and tipping.  This can also be used for hot pans.

Lighting in the galley, both natural and artificial, is worth consideration. In most boats, the galley is situated close to the companionway, which usually gives plenty of natural light. If your galley seems excessively gloomy, it would be worth fitting either an extra porthole, or – better still – a small deck hatch, which could also give additional ventilation. If neither of these is possible, contemplate one of those old-fashioned, but very effective, deck prisms over the cooker or chopping board.

If you have any choice in the matter of artificial light, go for a number of LED lights, carefully positioned. These are both bright and economical on electricity, and can be bought in 'warm white', which is more like an incadescent bulb in colour and doesn't fill the boat with the deathly pallor of fluorescent tubes. The ideal would be one over the sink, one over the cooker and one over the chopping board.  It is easy to buy bulbs with bayonet fittings that can go into attractive lights designed for incandescent bulbs, giving you the best of both worlds.

An oil lamp should also be fitted for when the amps are in short supply - although LEDs are so efficient, this is unlikely to happen, if you keep an eye on the rest of your electricity consumption. Hurricane lamps tend to throw too many shadows; if you can’t afford a decent gimballed lamp, buy a cheap, standing lamp and make a swinging base for it. Incidentally, beware of the brass oil lamps, whose burner screws into a nylon-threaded holder. The thread is very easy to strip and is almost impossible to repair.

Head torches are useful in the galley – particularly for rummaging in lockers.  The LED type of head torch and torches offer brilliant light and great economy, especially when used with rechargeable Ni-MH batteries.

Most people enjoy their food and the concerned cook will spend a lot of time preparing it – only to see it vanish in a few moments! Cooking on a boat underway is hard work and the task should be made as easy as possible for the cook (who should always receive due appreciation for her efforts). In harbour, it’s a pleasure to try out new foods and local specialties and the galley should enhance these experiences. Time and effort spent in creating a good galley are an investment, resulting in an improved quality of life for all concerned.