Voyage the Yacht-The Galley

The perfect boat discussion usually is centered around sail area to displacement ratios and designer/builder characteristics.  How about the galley and provisions stowage?  Very important stuff, food.  No food, no cruise.

Along the same lines as the cost of cruising, cooking during a cruise is going to be similar to the way you do it at home.  There are two big differences:  dry storage space (cabinets and shelving) and cold storage (refrigerators and freezers).  The smallest apartment or house has more stowage than almost any cruising yacht a couple can easily handle.

The resource:  http://theboatgalley.com/pressure-cookers/  Pressure cookers are the best.  Lots of great tips.  The author of this blog covers the subject well.

Reducing the galley discussion to simple terms:  

The drawers and cabinets must hold the utensils and cookware you use and the foods you cook.  

Fundamentals:
Pots and pans must fit on the stove burners when the yacht is sailing, heeling.  I prefer saute pans and pots without long handles.  A small stove top pressure cooker is almost essential.  However, if the pots are hard to stow and don't fit the stove, they are useless.

You know how you cook.  Now, you can start looking for the most suitable galley propelled by the appropriate sail area to displacement ratio.

Here are some views of two similar plain vanilla 38 footers of about 16,000 pounds displacement.  The galley is small with little workable counter space unless the navigation table is called into action.    I had a similar setup on the C&C 38 Mk 3 I skippered for years.  Using the navigation station as a surface is practical in port, count on it.

 Space behind the settee cushions may be suitable for some galley equipment.  The first thing to notice is that the storage space is going to need some sort of "lee cloth" to keep items from falling out.  this is a typical retrofit.  The PFDs demonstrate the amount of space available.

When you start voyaging your house, little things make the biggest differences.  House or boat, same, same.  Ashore, we can nip off to the nearest big box store for another set of shelf systems and set it up in the basement.  The rule of available space:  Parkinson's Law.