Food, glorious food.

Food, glorious food: The dehydrator is busily humming away.

Our plan is to stuff our boats with about 6 weeks worth of healthy home-dried food, and prepare a further 6 weeks worth of food that we'll send to Thursday Island. We are planning to take about 6 weeks to paddle from Cairns to TI but we are not going to be in a rush and are happy to take longer. We expect to supplement our dry rations during this period with fish, coconuts and whatever other bounty nature wishes to offer us.

Juz pretending to be a fisherman!

Unfortunately I am no fisho - I have tried trolling lures behing my kayak for hours on end with not the first hint of a bite. The pic above is my proudest fishing moment - a bonito that any serious fisho would hook up and use as live bait!! I know we have to be careful fishing from a kayak in shark and croc-infested waters. The thought of trailing a burley of tuna blood behind the kayak doesn't get me excited. I think a trip to the local fishing shop to get some tips might be on the cards.

For the PNG and Indonesian sections of Archipaddlo we are hoping (and relying on the fact) that we can obtain food along the way. We'll take 6 weeks of dried food with us, which is as much as we estimate we can fit, but this will really just be to supplement whatever we can find, catch, buy or barter for along the way. Whether it is sago, mudcrabs, bananas, or old leather boots - the uncertainty of what we'll be eating is a big part of our adventure.

We try to eat fresh and organic food as much as we can, and avoid processed food like the plague so we recently purchased an Excalibur 9 Tray Dehydrator (www.excaliburdehydrator.com) which is awesome. We have been testing all sorts of foods, fruits, meals, snacks that we might be able to take with us. I recently found some cheap strawberries and dried 40 punnets of them! That is really not that much for two people for three months. I recommend you try dehydrated rockmelon - a true gastronomic sensation!

Lunch ideas are proving hardest to dream up. Neither of us are Master Chefs - quick and simple food works best for us but we don't have a massive repertoire. We are not yet sure just what we'll eat day after day while sitting in a kayak miles from land. The experimenting is fun though - the house is full of yummy treats (lucky I'm not on a diet).

Anyway, for now I'm off to test some not-so-dehydrated roast lamb - I may as well eat it while I have the chance!!