Organizing Your Cruising Boat – The Basics

It took a while, but I eventually concluded that I would never perfectly organize my cruising boat. Every so often, I’d pull everything out of its cubby and try something new.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who found boat organization challenging. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what should go where . . . or “where do I even start?” But the real answer is that you’ll probably periodically decide that something’s just not working and change it around.

These are the basic principles of organizing a cruising boat.

Boat Organization is Iterative

How do you organize your cruising boat? You put stuff where it fits, and where you think it will work. You use it a while. Figure out what doesn’t work. Make changes. Then start again. 

Organizing your cruising boat is not a one-and-done process. It’s a series of constant adjustments until you find the best system for you. 

Important note: when you adjust where you store stuff, remember to update your tracking system. Your spreadsheet, notes applications, or dry erase board lists won’t help you find stuff if you don’t keep it up to date. 

So, how do you know when it’s time to start reorganizing your boat?

Pay Attention to Signs That Your Organization Plan Isn’t Working

You can reorganize things on a schedule. I suggest one good reason for doing so in the next point. But there’s one key way to know when it’s time to reorganize: things aren’t put away after use. I knew that I had a problem with how things were organized if things were never put back where they were meant to go. If a particular item was always left out or just piled on top of something else, it usually meant we were using it frequently, but didn’t have it stored in an easy-to-access place. So we left it on top. That was my clue that I needed to find a better place for it.

If I found Band-Aids, antiseptic, and so on ending up on the bathroom counter instead of in the big box of first aid supplies, it meant that it was just too hard to get to for the “everyday” things. A small box under the medicine cabinet made sense for the items we use all the time. It was a minor reorganization, but one that was a real improvement.

Organization Needs May Change Seasonally

We learned that we tended to reorganize things by season of the year, or if we were making a longer stay in a marina. In cold weather, jeans and fleeces get put in the easy-to-access drawers. When we’re out cruising, we rarely use the water hose, but the bucket we used for rinsing the anchor chain stayed close at hand. In a marina, the opposite is true.

If we were working on Barefoot Gal in a boatyard, things got organized totally differently. . . . then things have to go back to their “on the water” homes before we launch again. (Check out Cooking & Living in the Boatyard for some ideas about how life changes on the hard.)

Putting things away for a relaunch is a natural time to do another reorganization. I always arranged things slightly differently than I did before, fixing the problems I had last year.

When it was just the two of us, we used the guest bed to make a lot of gear more accessible. But when we had a guest, we found other places to tuck that gear into.

Your cruising grounds can also affect how you store things.

Organization Based on Different Cruising Grounds

In the galley, packaging can change from one place to another. When we cruised Mexico, in some areas all the wine was sold in bottles. A hundred miles away it’d be mostly in boxes. Of course that meant we had to store it in a different place. Ditto for products that were sold canned in one place and in Tetra packs the next time I provisioned.

In addition, you may stock up more on products when you’re entering cruising grounds where you expect to be less likely to find your favorites. Someone traveling the Great Loop will be fine buying a six-pack of beer. If you’re cruising the Tuamotus in French Polynesia or the Guna Yala in Panama, you’ll want to stock up when you find beer.

Reorganizing Helps You to Reevaluate Your Stores

Periodically evaluating your belongings keeps you from hoarding stuff you don’t need. If you find yourself relocating items you haven’t touched since the last time you reorganized, perhaps you don’t need them onboard at all. 

Our Boat Organization Experience

On our first boat, at first we found ourselves doing major rearranging maybe once a month. We would discover that the cubby that looked so perfect for all the tools was really a pain to get anything out of since we had to remove the companionway steps to access it. Or that it didn’t work to have the majority of my canned food under where Dave liked to sit while I was cooking. And so on. That first year was a straight-up learning curve!

I created the Basics of Living on a Boat course to share all the things I wish I had known when I began cruising. It’s all about making that learning curve less steep. Or take advantage of the All-Access Pass for one low price, giving you access to courses on Provisioning, Storage, Using the VHF radio, and more.

Organizing Your Cruising Boat is an Ongoing Task

I used to think that something was wrong with us that we couldn’t find the one “right” place for everything. But now I know that the best method was a combination of what we were doing at a given time and how our lives changed. And so I periodically reorganized.

If you move onto your boat expecting that you’ll be organizing and reorganizing through your entire cruising career, you’ll be less stressed. Knowing that organization is a constant process is yet one more way in which life aboard is vastly different than life on land.

Some links in this article (including all Amazon links) are affiliate links, meaning that we earn from qualifying purchases.