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Took NYETI out in A Slow Boat to Nowhere for an overnight trip on the Paw Paw Bends section of the Potomac in western Maryland. Worked quite well!

Geeze, Al, looks like a full load in your beautiful slow boat. Love to read and see your continuing adventures. I am sure your NYETI will perform as expected. Beautiful!!

A comment: Looks like you need a smaller slow boat dingy to carry your stuff when having a passenger in the real slow boat. You can just call it the slow dingy.

charlese wrote:Geeze, Al, looks like a full load in your beautiful slow boat. Love to read and see your continuing adventures. I am sure your NYETI will perform as expected. Beautiful!!

A comment: Looks like you need a smaller slow boat dingy to carry your stuff when having a passenger in the real slow boat. You can just call it the slow dingy.

Thanks for the kind words, Charlese, and also LOL! There were two of us! It is kind of surprising how an overnight trip for two guys in a canoe requires almost as much gear as a week long trip for two! And while it looks like the canoe was full, (1) we both had a lot of leg room and (2) we had a lot of freeboard (the distance from the waterline to the lowest spot on the gunnels), so the canoe was not remotely filled to capacity. It also paddled very sweetly and was stable going through the admittedly not very difficuly Class I rapids.

Good to hear(read).

Back when I last purchased a cooler I don't recall them ever saying or bragging about ice keeping. Granted that was a lot of years ago and don't normally keep tabs on such things but on my last trip out to a Meijer store they had them on display in the middle of an aisle so I had to look.

Some had no such claims but a few did. It appears they don't really define the test, well at least on the cooler, so how close this comes to real life would be debatable much less let you compare other coolers to these, same brand maybe but that would be about it, and that is a perhaps.

So the best they offered was this one:
I think this might be good marketing ploy as if I were shopping for one I would look for one with a lot of days listed just because it sounds impressive. It was also notable that the larger the cooler the longer the days and that nothing under 3 days was listed as far as the coolers there.

Note the one in the first photo was a 50 quart, this one is 40 quarts and only and I say only like this is a day less at 4 days.
Anyway things you don't learn here.

Ed

Right you are Ed (as usual). There's no standardized test conditions for cooler ice retention claims and no manufacture seems to say exactly what test conditions they used. So "keeps ice 5 days" might mean in the arctic during perpetual night in the dead of winter.

There are some YouTubers who've posted tests of different manufacturers' similarly sized coolers all being tested at the same time with the same amount of ice. That's slightly more relevant for comparative purposes, but still not very scientific.

I'm confident that the NYETI holds ice about as well or better than anything I could buy in the same size range. Plus, it was fun to build and is a little bit of a conversation piece.

Speaking of conversation pieces, between the put in and the take out last weekend I had to answer about a dozen questions from different people about A Slow Boat to Nowhere.

algale wrote:and no manufacture seems to say exactly what test conditions they used. So "keeps ice 5 days" might mean in the arctic during perpetual night in the dead of winter.

The 50 quart one states "Ice storage st 90° F".

beeg wrote:

algale wrote:and no manufacture seems to say exactly what test conditions they used. So "keeps ice 5 days" might mean in the arctic during perpetual night in the dead of winter.

The 50 quart one states "Ice storage st 90° F".

Ok. But how much ice did they start with? Was it full of ice which means no food or beer? Was it one large block or the kind of cubed ice you get at the store? How often did they open the cooler? How much ice was left at the end?

Now that I've had time to recover, I thought I'd give an after-action report. I took NYETI on an extended trip. The canoe trip itself was 5 day/4 nights in northern Maine. But the total round trip was 9.5 days (including travel to and from Maine plus visits with family and friends before and after the trip). The weather was fairly typical for Maine at that time of September. Days in the 70s and 80s. Nights in the 50s.

Before leaving, I put the cooler, food and 2 five liter soft plastic jugs of water (filled 3/4 of the way) into the freezer. There was little airspace.

The cooler kept cool the entire time and when I got home at the end of day 9.5 there was still a significant amount of ice in the two bags, as you can see in these photos.
Now for the rest of the story. My paddling partner and I had an unexpected mishap where we went for a swim in the river. All the gear, including NYETI, floated down the rapids (1/2 mile) and free floated about another mile before NEYTI eventually came to rest against a rock. NYETI suffered no visible damage! And I when I open it, there was approximately 2-3 tablespoons of water in the bottom, which may have just been accumulated condensation as opposed to river water. So NYETI takes a licking and keeps on ticking and stays cold!

Very impressive cooler performance!

BTW, last Sunday my wife and I went on a 7-mile river paddle, in a rented canoe. Just Class I rapids, but good exercise and plenty of rocks to maneuver between. Not too bad for an old guy, I thought .. until I got home and read about your adventure!