You want to put an elephant where?

By Mike Jastrzebski

It’s a rhetorical question of course, but my wife, Mary, frequently says that finding room for six months of provisions on a 36 foot sailboat is like trying to stuff an elephant into a breadbox. The problem is that she’s not kidding.

Right now we have boxes of food items piled on our settees, just barely leaving ourselves room to sit. It’s rather embarassing when someone stops by the boat to chat. We can’t really bring them down below because of the piles waiting to be shoved, pushed and prodded into an already packed locker.

It’s why we don’t keep a lot of clothing on board. We have one 3′x3′x3′ locker devoted to clothing, a few hooks in the head and a few more hooks behind our battery boxes and that’s it.

We don’t have room for many books and that precious space is reserved for boating related books and guides. Fortunately we each have a Kindle. I like to read, always have and always will, so I know we could never carry enough paper books for our planned trip.

Throw in the extra boat parts, charts and tools and I’m sure you get the picture. If you live on a boat now you know what I mean. If you’re thinking of moving aboard, you’ll find out soon enough.

I’m going to ask anyone out there reading this who has a good storage idea to share their thoughts, and I’m going to add two of my own discoveries. Bolster storage and film canister ice cubes. Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think of these ideas on my own. Somewhere along the way over the seventeen years we’ve owned Rough Draft I either read about these ideas or someone told me about them. But I’ve adopted them, and they help make our cruising a little more bearable.

We made the bolsters out of the same material as our settee cushions, added a zipper, and fill them with whatever soft and malleable items we can’t find a place for. Jackets, gloves, t-shirts, whatever.

As for the film canisters, they’re getting harder to find, but they are still out there. We have about fifty of them and we fill them with water and stick them into the freezer as room permits. If we use a pound of burger, five or six canisters take it’s place offering perfect ice cylinders. Just pop the cap, turn the canister upside down, and rub it between the palms of your hands until the ice slides out.