10 Tips to stay cool on a Boat
This spring has been one of the wettest and coolest in a while. But even in Portland, Oregon the spring ends and summer begins. On one of the recent weekends, the temperatures were hovering just below triple digits Saturday through Monday. With this video and blog, we share our tips to beat the heat. We recognize these tips apply to us while at the dock and may not be suitable for everyone. And certainly, our tips to beat the heat will change when we can be out at anchor!
Tip 1: Pre-prepared food. Where possible we prepare our food for the day (or days) in the cooler morning hours and store it away for cooking later. This way when it comes time to eat we save the time, labor, and energy needed for complete preparation and instead can focus on keeping ourselves cool in other ways.
Tip 2: Avoid cooking inside. Most modern full-size cruising boats, ours included, have a way to create heat for cooking. Aboard Yara, we cook by burning propane (have you seen our propane system videos?). Cooking heats up our delicious and necessary food but it also means the boat will heat up. By cooking outside on our BBQ (related video and blog) we keep the heat outside the boat. The BBQ we purchased is this one:
But we’re also curious to try solar cooking. Have any of you used one of these GoSun solar cookers?
How do you like it? Let us know in the comments of the video.
Tip 3: Hose ourselves off! Assuming the dock water is potable & safe, we spray ourselves! A spray nozzle on the end of the hose with a mist setting cools us down. We actually don’t recommend this spray nozzle we featured in the video:
But we do recommend the hose (see related videos for why we have the hose we have):
Tip 4: Plan ahead. In Portland during the summer it usually cools off by 20-30 degrees at night. Thank goodness! So we plan for that dip in temperature by waking up early & preparing our food in the morning (see tip 1 above) or working on projects earlier in the day. Then during the hottest part of the day in the afternoons, we only need to worry about keeping ourselves cool by being on the water (or spraying ourselves with water!).
Tip 6: Shade the boat. Our tarp has been working very well to keep the boat dry. We covered the benefits of a tarp in our moisture control video and related blog. But now that the sun is shining this tarp is keeping our boat shaded. The sun isn’t able to shine directly onto the boat which of course helps keep the temperature down.
Tip 7: Air conditioning. While not usually practical at anchor without a generator or massive solar array and battery capacity we will take advantage of AC while plugged into shore power at the dock. We’ve found that our simple household window AC unit is powerful enough to cool the boat about 15-20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature. This is the one we’ve been using:
Tip 8: Fans! We’re huge fans. We won’t even bore you with links or Amazon or other videos because fan videos and blogs and Amazon links are everywhere on this channel. Trust us. Fans.
Tip 9: Get on the water. We live in a floating home. So we get on the water! It might be close to triple digits in the air but the water currently hovers around 60 degrees. Our Oru Kayaks (related blogand video) does a great job in helping us stay cool by getting out on the water. Matt uses the Beach LT and Devin uses the Inlet:
Tip 10: Ice machine. Again probably not practical while at anchor but with shore power, we can have our icemaker going to cool down our drinks, create ice bags for hot feet or injuries, and even share with neighboring boats! Devin calls it her first favorite thing on the boat, even ahead of Matt.
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Video Link: https://youtu.be/U4p2Slzidn4
