If you’re cruising in temperate climates, you may not find it necessary to store these items in the refrigerator. But in a tropical summer, it can make all the difference — and once you’re bought something, you want to be able to use it, right?
Wasabi/Horseradish
One of the first things that we learned is that when wasabi gets warm, it quickly loses its bite. It doesn’t just degrade slightly — it has all the flavor of sawdust. Ditto for horseradish, although it has a slightly longer shelf life outside the refrigerator.
Regardless of whether you use powder or paste, and even if the container is unopened, both wasabi and horseradish need to be stored in the refrigerator if they are to be stored for any time at all.
Also beware of buying any wasabi or horseradish that’s in stores without air conditioning!
Sealants
When you’re in the middle of a repair job — particularly when you’re a day or more from a hardware store — you really don’t want to discover that the tube of sealant you need is rock hard. We did, several times. A couple of times, we even found unopened tubes had gone off. To say that we were not happy would be an understatement.
Once we began storing the sealants in the refrigerator, we found that we could easily keep them six months or more, even once they were opened (of course, we made sure they were tightly re-sealed).
On our previous boat, our refrigerator had one corner that was awkward to get to, and we put all the little tubes in a plastic box with a lid and stuck it back in there. They don’t need to be in a particularly cold section of the refrigerator, and you don’t want them up against a chill plate where they could freeze (freezing is generally bad for sealants).
I also stuck several of the large tubes (like you use with a caulk gun) behind our drink storage bins.
On our current boat, there’s one oddly shaped door shelf that nothing really fits on . . . except sealant tubes. Perfect!
Even with storing the sealants in the refrigerator, I recommend checking all of them before leaving a major port if you’re going to be in places where you can’t get more. We always made sure we had several fresh tubes on board before we left La Paz to spend summer in the Sea of Cortez. And we tried to buy from air conditioned stores unless we knew it was something we were going to use immediately. When possible, lightly squeeze the tube before buying to make sure that the contents are still good.
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Eggs, red wine and chocolate need to be stored below 30○c too.our coolstore of around15 works perfectly. Yes we store sealant in there too and we had some particularly sensitive paint in there.
A tip we learned from another cruiser. When you only use a small amount of a sealant and want to save the rest for another project. Clean the sealant off the cap and tip. Then apply a light coating of Vaseline. The cap will not “glue” itself to the tip. 🙂
Great idea about keeping the sealant in the fridge. that is going to save us some cash and frustration which makes the Cpt happy.. 🙂
Diane Dashevsky says
Prescription medication!!! Heat and humidity will “melt” them. Unfortunately, learned this from Life’s Great Teacher – Experience 🙁
Carolyn Shearlock says
Thanks so much for adding that . . . see Diane’s great way for storing the meds so they DON’T melt:
Storing Medications
sue says
Eggs, red wine and chocolate need to be stored below 30○c too.our coolstore of around15 works perfectly. Yes we store sealant in there too and we had some particularly sensitive paint in there.
Cindy on Cream Puff says
A tip we learned from another cruiser. When you only use a small amount of a sealant and want to save the rest for another project. Clean the sealant off the cap and tip. Then apply a light coating of Vaseline. The cap will not “glue” itself to the tip. 🙂
Great idea about keeping the sealant in the fridge. that is going to save us some cash and frustration which makes the Cpt happy.. 🙂
David Stewart says
A wire nut is a great item to screw on the cap of a sealant tube to prolong freshness.