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Jam Jars

Many restaurants serve jams with breakfast and quite often, they are small jars of a variety of jams, marmalade, honey and peanut butter. After use, don’t leave the jars behind. Take them home and wash them for reuse on the boat. These little jars are the perfect size to fill with your favorite jam or spice or sauce for one meal on the boat.

This way, you don’t have to take a whole jar of mayonnaise or jam or ketchup or whatever when all you need is a little. It packs easier, takes up less space in the cupboard or small frig or cooler.

Small Jars and Bottles

Save your empty spice jars and sauce jars. Even a small vanilla bottle is great for salad dressing for a meal on the boat. The 1 oz liquor bottles you can buy in a liquor store or in the mini bar in your hotel room are perfect as spice bottles for the boat. Just wash, re-label and reuse.

Collecting these small jars and plastic bottles now and over the next few months will make packing for outings on the boat much easier. They tuck into the small cupboards and frig and cooler a lot easier than larger containers. Just fill them from your kitchen size or bulk containers rather than shopping for a second one for the boat.

Plastic Grocery Bags

Most supermarkets are still using plastic grocery bags. Save them to reuse as garbage bags on the boat. After each shopping trip, roll them into sausages as I recommend in First Mate 101 and tie with a twist tie. Dozens of these “sausages” will fit in small spaces on the boat and in the car. You’ll be amazed at the number of uses you can come up with.

Our main use for them on the boat is for garbage. They are the perfect size and handles tie easily to a door handle or handhold while you are preparing a meal. After the meal, they tie easily so that the garbage and smell are sealed. You can squeeze out all the air to reduce the size of the bag and then place in a larger garbage bag elsewhere on the boat.

They are small enough to fit a few in your pocket or purse and are great to carry with you when on a shopping excursion, walking the dog, collecting shells at the beach or swimming so you can bring home wet suits and towels or sandy shoes. There are dozens more uses for these “sausages”.

Newspaper and Flyer Sleeves

If you have your newspapers or flyers delivered in those plastic sleeves, save them. They make excellent storage for rolled towels and small blankets allowing you to stand them in lockers or stack them on shelves. It makes them easy to handle, keeps them clean, you know which are unused and you can use them over and over again.

Product Wrap

When doing renovations around the house this spring, watch for products that are wrapped in plastic wrap. Quite often they are huge clear plastic sleeves (like boxes of laminated flooring). Just cut one end and slide off the plastic and you have a perfect sleeping bag or pillow cover. Even if you have rolled and tied your sleeping bag, the plastic protects it when transferring from the trunk to the cart to the boat from dirt, water and rain. The clear plastic allows you to see the contents.

I never forget the story my friend told me years ago. They put everything in large green garbage bags like they’d been doing for years. This one day, however, the bag with the kids clothes went to the garbage bin and the bag with the garbage went to the boat. Now, I’m a believer in the clear bags!

Old Face Cloths and Hand Towels

Save your old worn out face cloths and hand towels. They make great rags for those dirty engine and bilge jobs. There is nothing worse than the handy man grabbing one of your good towels or dish cloths for those messy jobs!

When replacing your tired cotton sheets and pillow cases, save the old ones. Cut them into cleaning and polishing cloths the size you prefer and take them to the boat.

The more cotton content the better they work to polish the vinyl windows, chrome rails and even fiberglass. They don’t leave lint because they are well worn and washed so many times and they are easy to use and reuse. Even if you have old cotton t-shirts, cut them into squares and use them as cleaning polishing cloths too.

Odd Socks

I have a friend who takes the “odd” socks that show up in the laundry and uses them as cleaning cloths on the boat. They are great for getting spiders and webs too!

Old Toothbrushes

Don’t throw away old toothbrushes. Keep a few for the boat because they come in handy in hard to clean places like the bases of stanchions, around cleats, taps and corners.

You can even heat the toothbrush handle and bend it to the shape you need for your particular cleaning challenge. Doug bent one for me close to the brush at 90 degrees. Now, I can simply insert it into my coffee pot (old fashioned kind that is great for the boat) and the brush is the right angle to clean the bottom.

Elastics

Many vegetables like Romaine Lettuce and Broccoli come secured with elastics that can be reused around cereal bags (if you don’t use zip lock bags) to keep the contents fresh and from spilling in the cupboard. Unlike boxes, the bag gets smaller after each meal freeing up cupboard space.

Mesh Sleeves

The Liquor Stores in Ontario are doing away with plastic, but if you buy more than one bottle at a store where they still use the mesh sleeve, save it. Use it when transporting bottles to and from the boat to prevent breakage. I even use them in the boat cupboards to prevent the bottles hitting each other when in rough water.

Wine Corks

Save the corks from your wine bottles so you have a place for the kids to store their fish hooks.

Mesh Onion Bags

Use your large mesh onion bags for keeping snorkels and masks and flippers together. They have a draw string so are easy to carry to and from the beach and are airy so no worries about moisture or mold. You can also use them to keep BBQ tools together in a cupboard or bilge.

More Ideas

No doubt, you will come up with many more ideas of collectibles over the spring that will simplify chores and enhance your boating experience this season. Please pass on your ideas so we can share them with other boaters in a future newsletter.

Happy collecting for happy boating. Checkout First Mate 101 to make your boating more enjoyable.

Brenda Dawson

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