The Galley

This is where I’m really going to feel the effect of a much shorter boat. Sanity Again has an award winning galley, unusually long with a great example of the Braidbar Welsh dresser on one side, no less than four drawers wide with cupboards under. The other side has a Samsung Staron worktop, double sink and cooker and fridge. 

In OMDB, we need to fit in a washing machine, but won’t have a gas cooker. Instead, there’ll be an induction hob and I’m seriously contemplating going for a microwave/oven/grill combi. Apart from the month we’re not allowed to stay in the lodge from mid-January to mid-February, we won’t be living on board in the winter, so the cooking requirements will be much simpler, more salads, fewer soups and stews. In addition, one of my main reasons for using  the oven on SA is because it’s so hard to do a really slow simmer over a propane flame. I’m hoping the induction hob will go lower than that.

Obviously, storage is going to be the main challenge, but once more the fact that we are no longer full time liveaboards will help. I still want a dresser – it won’t feel like a Braidbar without one – but we’re a bit undecided about the other worktop. Possibly Staron or similar again, but maybe quartz? Certainly not granite, far too much effort to maintain. It’ll be a single sink with drainer unless the worktop is thick enough to rout drainage channels.

The one thing that seriously dissatisfies me with the current set up is the fridge. It’s a perfectly respectable Shoreline, but just too small. I wanted a slightly larger one but when we were building SA, Peter Mason persuaded me to go smaller so that it would fit under the worktop. This time, I’m determined to have a taller one with more than a shoebox sized frozen food compartment. It’s one of the things to check out over the next couple of years. On Sanity, we had a socking great Zanussi fridge freezer with side by side compartments. I could freeze enough meat for a month but it was sooo power hungry that, even with a TravelPower AC generator, we had to run the engine for four hours every day to keep the batteries charged. Of course, the lithium batteries change all that, too, but there still won’t be room for such a big beast.

Next time, the bathroom.