The ability to make hot food and drinks on The Aegre, even in the worst of weather, was a significant contributor to the voyage’s success.
We built the cooker ourselves based on that used successfully by John Ridgway and Chay Blyth in the transatlantic row in 1966 aboard English Rose 2, an open 20ft Yorkshire dory. Ours was based around a Primus pressure stove rather than a solid fuel burner; otherwise, it was very similar.
Our cooker comprised a basic kerosene-burning Primus pressure stove (with an adjustable flame but not self-pricking) held down by a stretchy steel spring in the bottom of an empty cylinder-shaped recycled 20-litre paint can.
Access to the stove for filling, lighting and control was through a hole cut in the side of the lower half of the can, which had a hinged door that could be closed. The top of the primus was about halfway up the can, just fitting the diameter of the can.
Holes were punched in the bottom of the can to allow air in for the burner when the door was closed.
A slot was cut in the upper half of the can to take the handle of a pot or frying pan, so the handle never became hot. We bought two pots and a fry pan which exactly fitted inside the can. The top of the largest pot was level with the top of the surrounding can.
The paint can had two lugs welded onto each side at the top, which fitted into two arms coming down from the underside of the deck, just inside the hatch to the port. Thus, the can and its contents could swing laterally across the boat as the boat heeled.
Ah, but what about lighting, I hear you say. Conventionally basic Primus stoves are troublesome to light, requiring pre-heating of the fuel vaporiser with alcohol or the like. We took a more modern approach, using a GAZ cartridge blow lamp.
Lighting was simple:
- Pump up the kero pressure on the Primus but keep the fuel turned off,
- Light the blowlamp (1 match),
- Heat the fuel vaporiser on the cooker (count to 5 max),
- Turn on cooker fuel – hey presto, it’s roaring away.
Each Gaz cartridge lasted about two months, lighting the cooker about 6 times a day minimum.
Set up, lit, and cooking (with the side door closed), the cooker was unaffected by wind or spray (or even the top of the odd wave we discovered), and it was impossible to touch anything hot by accident, so there were no burns.
With Primus spares and kerosene available in every port, this was a simple, reliable and inexpensive cooking arrangement. Indeed it was the envy of many visitors to our little boat from much larger and more expensively equipped vessels, who said their lavish galleys became useless in nasty weather!
That all said, how did it go long term, and how did it survive the mid-Pacific capsize?
Surprisingly (to us), the blowlamp was the first to fail. About a year out from Scotland, hidden corrosion suddenly rendered it useless (probably discovered when changing cylinders, but I can’t recall the detail). We had to resort to using alcohol for preheating until the next port, where we bought a new blowlamp.
After the mid-Pacific capsize, the cooker spent quite a few hours underwater, as I tell in the book. By then, we had acquired a spare, a self-pricking model. But corrosion jammed the pricker in-situ, and the separate prickers were lost. I made new prickers by filing down stainless wire strands. Water in the kerosene added a further difficulty. In theory, we could separate them (the kerosene being less dense and therefore floating on top of the water), but not quite so easy on a small, constantly moving boat at sea.
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