Top 5 staycation hacks for your trailer boat

Last year, summer was all about heading out on a few weekend fishing trips while filling in time travelling to and from work. Maybe there’s a short break over the Christmas and New Year period where you jump in the car and catch up with interstate relatives, or even take an overseas trip.

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Not any more. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a sudden stop to quite a few plans that 12 months ago would have been entirely viable, but now look something of a pipe dream.

Your boat can easily become the new centre of your summer plans, providing an escape from the family home in the great outdoors – yep, it's the dawn of the great Australian staycation.

Here are our top tips on how to turn your boat into a mobile camper.

One of the biggest mistakes when planning for a trip away on the boat is believing you need everything you’re taking.

Packing light is very important for two reasons. First, space on a trailer boat is probably best described as severely limited, meaning you will quickly run out of room to store things.

Second, boats have very rigid weight limits. Add too much flotsam and a few bodies and you could easily exceed the boat’s safety rating, running a higher risk of the boat swamping unexpectedly.

A good idea, particularly if you’re going to camp for a couple of nights, is to pre-pack somewhere in the house before carting everything onto the boat. It allows you to lay everything down and assess whether you will have the room to pack it all onboard.

Be hyper-critical; do you really need an extra pair of socks if you’re going to be rocking thongs for most of the trip? You can’t just reuse the ones you wore for a few hours the day before?

Don’t use plastic containers for storing things. Instead, use storage bags that can squash down to minimise the amount of space they take up. There are some great bag-based storage systems available.

There’s two options when it comes to overnighting on a trailer boat; sleeping onshore or on the boat.

My preference is to always sleep on the boat, but sometimes it’s just more comfortable on land, particularly when the wind gets up.

If you have a swag, choosing between ship or shore is an easy decision; you just throw your swag down and your bed for the night is ready to go.

However, it’s a bit more complicated if you have a tent, which is a bit difficult to fit in a standard cockpit. If you are going to go down the tent route, at least buy one that is tall enough for you to sit up in – it’s surprising how much better an experience you get from this simple benefit.

Sleeping bags always need sleeping mats, and your experience with them will vary widely, largely depending on budget. One trick if you’re sleeping on sand is to dig out small hollows for your hip and shoulder to make lying down more comfortable.

If you’re pitching a tent in sand, you’re better off ditching the tent pegs. Instead, cut squares of plywood with a couple of holes in the centre to attach the guide rope, and bury them as deep as you can in the sand.

Rolling out the swag in the cockpit is pretty much a set-and-forget measure. Put your head up at the bow end of the boat – if your boat uses a tote tank the fuel will make noise sloshing around all night, and draw moisture from the air. Ensure you’ve shut off the tank’s breather, too.

If mozzies are a nuisance, a single bed mozzie net is a must-have for a good night’s sleep. Set up right, it can enclose the entire cockpit. A squirt of Aeroguard will ensure the cockpit is bug-free for the night.

If you’re camping on the boat, pack an extra anchor so you can turn the bow of the boat into the waves if the wind is pushing in a different direction. It will minimise the uncomfortable side-to-side rolling.

At home, the average household uses around 160 to 200 litres of water a day. If you need to drink only what you can carry, you’ll need to plan your water needs a bit more carefully.

Roughing it, you can make do with a couple of litres per person per day, but you will need more – up to 3.0 litres a day – during hotter weather. In theory, two people over the course of a weekend can get by with 20 litres of drinking-quality water, with some in reserve.

A litre of water weighs a kilogram, so carrying more water obviously means adding more weight to the boat that may come at the cost of carrying something else. In the end, how long you stay away will come down to your ability to replenish drinking supplies.

One of the worst ways to cart water is in a 20-litre jerry can. They’re cumbersome, difficult to store and manage, heavy, and trying to pour out of them into a water bottle can be a real mess.

Instead, use smaller 10-litre water containers that can take a screw-in plastic twist tap, as they are much more user-friendly.

Ditch the Engel for a decent icebox. Generally speaking, trailer boats have limited battery capacity, and the power demands of an electric fridge are likely to be higher than the boat can provide over a weekend.

A good-quality icebox will keep cold for a number of days, with the better ones lasting close to a week, particularly if you pre-chill things at home before adding them.

The key to an icebox is using extra-large zip-lock sandwich bags for everything you put in it. The food-grade zip-lock bags will prevent anything you put in the icebox from contaminating or tainting the ice, meaning you will be able to safely add a few cubes to a pre-sunset drink.

More seasoned boat campers will realise the benefit of having a few bagged-up home-cooked meals – pre-frozen in the freezer – somewhere in the icebox in the event the fishing doesn’t work out.

The best advice is to never cook on a trailer boat using a portable cooker if you can help it.

If you don’t already have a propane-fuelled cooker built into the boat, you’re probably using a butane cooker – the ones with the small replaceable gas canisters.

The risk is that butane is heavier than air, meaning if you turn the cooker’s tap on and don’t light it, the gas can fill the cockpit and cause an explosion.

In contrast, propane is lighter than air and will float away, minimising the risk of an explosion. The downside? It comes in big, heavy gas cylinders.

If you are going to use a butane cooker, spend good money to get a decent one. Something like a JetBoil, which can heat a cup of water in less than a minute, is compact, efficient and user-friendly.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently warned against using defective “lunchbox” gas cookers that have the gas canisters mounted inside the cooker.

The cookers are especially vulnerable if the top of them is covered by something like a large frypan, causing the canister to overheat and explode if the overpressure valve fails.

Don’t ever use a portable cooker to warm a boat at night. Burnt gas creates highly toxic carbon monoxide that, like butane, is heavier than air. If it pools you can drown in it without even knowing.