{"id":2181,"date":"2023-02-24T15:42:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-24T15:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/?p=2181"},"modified":"2023-02-24T15:42:04","modified_gmt":"2023-02-24T15:42:04","slug":"the-cooker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/the-cooker\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cooker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s a bit of a beast, the new cooker. This was always going to be a major part of the big refit: A decent cooker. A cooker that wouldn\u2019t break down – and since this is a boat for life, it had to be a cooker for life.<\/p>\n

If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you will have seen regular rants about marine cookers – I\u2019ve tried them all: The ancient brass Taylors, an alcohol affair that took my eyebrows off. I had two venerable Flavell Vanessas from the 70s (in beige, of course). I had a very shiny, all stainless steel thing that wasn\u2019t stainless at all.<\/p>\n

And on Samsara, I\u2019ve been going through cookers like Wet Wipes at a birthday party for three-year-olds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the second Vanessa broke free of its fastenings jumping off a wave a week from The Lizard, I didn\u2019t turn a hair. I had already blamed it for the gas leak and the consequent disastrous experiments with Nutella salad in place of hot food. As soon as I docked at Pendennis, it was going in the marina skip. Already, I had selected its replacement from the Force4 catalogue: All stainless steel this time and with a heroic, salty name – The Neptune 4000. It had flame-failure devices. It had a thermostatic oven. It was the real deal.<\/p>\n

It lasted fourteen months. The right-hand flame-failure device packed up. It was going rusty. I sent it back under the guarantee, and Force4 replaced it (I forgot about having to pay a gas fitter \u00a3100 to connect the new one).<\/p>\n

That lasted eighteen months. The right-hand flame-failure device packed up, and it was going rusty\u2026<\/p>\n

There was something wrong here, surely. But when you think about it, boatbuilders are working to a budget – a budget that assumes that even their keenest customer is going to be using the product at weekends only for six months of the year – apart from a two-week cruise in August. So the cooker is only going to be in use for 62 days a year (38 if you assume they eat ashore on Saturday night).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was using mine almost ten times as much.<\/p>\n

So to be fair, my dead cookers had really had a lifespan of 15 years.<\/p>\n

Never mind, Samsara<\/i> was coming up to her 50th birthday. All sorts of things were going rusty. But then I anchored off the Island of Santa Luzia in the Cape Verdes and went ashore just because the book said the island was uninhabited. Don\u2019t you find there is something about uninhabited islands which just cries out for someone to go and inhabit them – even if just for an afternoon?<\/p>\n

In fact, I found that it hadn\u2019t always been this way. There was evidence of stone walls poking out of the barren red earth.<\/p>\n

When I got back to the beach, I found Santa Luzia had two inhabitants: Ruffian, the big Westerly, had turned up, and Iain swam ashore to invite me to dinner. I remember taking a spare oar, reasoning that if I broke one, I would end up in Panama.<\/p>\n

More than that, I remember the cooker. Fiona showed it off like a 1950s TV advert. It was so good they had imported it from their last boat.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Their last boat? It looked brand new.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt always looks brand new. It doesn\u2019t get rusty because it\u2019s made of absolutely the best materials money can buy.\u201d<\/p>\n