I was tasked with putting together our kit and let me tell you, I was nervous. With a plan as open ended as ours, I wanted to cover all my bases. So, I started with Google. Bayview Yacht Club, Riparia, and Practical Sailor were beyond helpful. And then I contacted some of our medical friends (shout out to Brandon G!) for more on the ground personal advice. After that, I made an exhaustive list of meds and supplies. It was a mere 150 items. You know, nothing big (gulp!). There exist some ready-made kits, but the the best and most comprehensive run in the $1000 range--way more than we wanted to spend at this time. So I set about organizing the comprehensive list I had and trimming it down. Ultimately we ended up forgoing things like sutures because for at least the next few years we won't be more than a few days from civilization and super glue and steri strips ought to do it until we can get to an emergency room.
I ended up with 15 categories of supplies. They range from first aid (including rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and tongue depressors) to cough/cold/flu. Once I had my final list of must-haves, I started price checking. I looked on amazon, target, cvs, walgreens, and wal-mart. I priced everything and bought from the least expensive vendor. Once we purchased and received all our items, I took them by category and bagged them up in gallon bags. If an item had specific usage instructions on the box, I cut it off and included it in the gallon bag. Each bag had a paper printout of the contents of said bag. Some of the categories were so exhaustive, we had to divide them into multiple bags, each labeled with contents.
Once all the bags were packed, we strategically packed them into a duffle since that's about the only bag we could actually fit everything into!
And that's about it. We have our comprehensive list to resupply from and will continue to monitor our usage and reassess what has been/is being used and decide what needs added or subtracted. We also have a very small kit (about the size of an average hard back book) that has our most frequently used items at close hand (pepto, nose spray, tylenol, tums, bandaids).
I ended up with 15 categories of supplies. They range from first aid (including rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and tongue depressors) to cough/cold/flu. Once I had my final list of must-haves, I started price checking. I looked on amazon, target, cvs, walgreens, and wal-mart. I priced everything and bought from the least expensive vendor. Once we purchased and received all our items, I took them by category and bagged them up in gallon bags. If an item had specific usage instructions on the box, I cut it off and included it in the gallon bag. Each bag had a paper printout of the contents of said bag. Some of the categories were so exhaustive, we had to divide them into multiple bags, each labeled with contents.
Once all the bags were packed, we strategically packed them into a duffle since that's about the only bag we could actually fit everything into!
And that's about it. We have our comprehensive list to resupply from and will continue to monitor our usage and reassess what has been/is being used and decide what needs added or subtracted. We also have a very small kit (about the size of an average hard back book) that has our most frequently used items at close hand (pepto, nose spray, tylenol, tums, bandaids).
