The following page describes the boating products and equipment that we have used on our sailing catamaran and found to be either indispensable or top quality.
We received this pressure cooker as a departure gift from our friends on our trip in June 2006. The model we have is the 7 litre one. We found out that the Kuhn Rikon brand made in Switzerland is to beconsidered to be the Rolls Royce of pressure cookers. We have been using it for over 3 months now and Carllie uses it almost everyday. It is a beautiful of stainless cooking equipment. It cooks most items in one-half to one-third the cooking times of conventional pot cooking. It saves time and propane.
We already had a Garmin black and white 168 GPS Sounder for the last 5 years and have really found it an excellent piece of electronics. In preparing for our trip early this year we decided to upgrade to the color version with Garmin Bluechart cartography. After 3 months of use, we sure glad we bought one. It was almost something that was cut off the budget early in the year when we were doing our final outfitting because we thought it might be in the luxury category but after 3 months of use in the fog conditions of the Washington, Orgeon, and California coasts we are sure glad we bought one. The Garmin 178C combined with our Furuno radar has taken alot of the stress out of the virtually unavoidable trips and destination arrivals in the fog and low visibility.
The two key advatages of the Garmin 178C are the ease of operation and the low power consumption. In terms of ease of operation the Garmin interface is so intuitively easily. Many times when visiting other boats, people are showing me something on their GPS. All the other brands are complicated and clumsy in their operation. Everything seems to take longer, more keystrokes, or slower refesh times. In terms of power consumption, the Garmin 178C only draws 0.7 amps so you can have it on all the time. We had originally though of using a chart program on our Panasonic laptop but the reality is that the laptop draws 3 to 4 amps of 12 volt power which runs into a whole lot of amp hours.