With most of the day being very windy and rainy, we decided to stay hunkered down on board Leu Cat, keeping warm and dry. In fact, it was a great day to work on one of the real bug-a-boos we have on our boat…..the Eno oven. This oven has been the bain of Mary Margaret’s life while cruising for the last 8 years simply because she cannot get it hot enough to bake the things she loves such as cakes.

Since returning to our boat over a month ago, I have been trying to get more spun glass insulation to better insulate the oven and make it more heat efficient. Jeremy, one of the owners of the chandlery here at the marina had a friend who had a portion of a roll that he had left over. He donated it to us and it was waiting for us when we returned from safari.

With it windy and wet outside, it was the perfect time to tackle this project and see what results we could come up with. It took a few hours to wrestle it out of its spot in the galley and then take it apart. In the process of adding an extra two inches of insulation all around the darn thing, I also did a few repairs on it to address some of the quirky things that were bothering us. This included increasing the tension of the door springs so that the oven door would stay up in bashing seas and fixing the door lock that locks the door shut.

In addition to adding the insulation over the top and around the two sides, I also put some underneath it and put 4 inches behind it. There had not been any in those two locations.

After putting everything back together again and screwing it back in place under the stove, we fired it up to test the results. We are pleased to say that the oven reached 375 degrees F in record time and Mary Margaret had a big smile on her face. Also, we found that the salon did not get hot at all as most of the heat was retained in the oven itself, instead of oozing out and heating up the salon. The sides and face of the oven were also relatively cool compared to before.

I believe we may have reached even higher temperatures if we left it on longer but Mary Margaret was very happy with 375 degrees so we stopped the test there and turned the thing off to not waste propane.

The weather is supposed to improve tomorrow so we plan on going shopping for provisions and then I will run into Cape Town to pay for and pick up the new gel batteries that are waiting for us.