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| Every cruising blog seems to have a photo like this. Shopping for all this food was the easy part. I'm going to stow it where exactly? |
“You should bring enough food to be able to live off your
stores for 3 months without ever seeing a supermarket,” advised our experienced
cruiser friends as my eyes widened. “And
6 months for things where you really want your specific brand.” It was late springtime in Annapolis and we
were planning our trip to the deserted Bahamas Out Islands for the coming
winter. “Okay, then,” I responded with a
calm I definitely did not feel, while trying to decide if I needed my regular
brand of organic, fire-roasted, petite-diced canned tomatoes or just generic canned
tomatoes. This was going to be the real
deal – just us, deserted tropical islands.
No grocery stores. No people.
That summer was the planning time. For months, I kept grocery lists to figure
out our shopping patterns. If I had it
to do over again, I would have written my lists in a small notebook; much
easier and neater than keeping the odd collection of envelopes and scraps of
paper that I actually use. At one point
I even built a computerized list, organized by the aisles in our local grocery
store. We’re vegetarians who added
limited species of fin fish into our diet at the advice of the nutritionist
after Dan’s cancer surgery; at least we weren’t going to have to figure out how
to store steaks and bacon. From studying
my accumulated grocery lists, we learned that we generally eat 1-2 fish meals
per week, and 3-4 bean, grain, or pasta meals, and 2 cheesy dairy meals. In theory.
In practice, we eat out once or twice a week, and have one “meal” that
is really just a couple of glasses of wine with snacks and friends. Non-food supplies like shampoo and paper
products and plastic bags, had to be accounted for as well. Want to know how long a tube of toothpaste or
box of laundry detergent lasts? Write
the date you put it into service on it with magic marker. We both cook for fun as much as sustenance,
which means there are also condiments and spices to contend with. Inevitably I’ll
complain that there’s nothing in the fridge – but the fridge is not empty, there’s
a bunch of space taken up with half-bottles of salsa and maple syrup and
mustard and mayonnaise. There are
partial bottles of Trader Joe’s sauces, flavors that we tried once or twice and
liked, so we bought several more to use again, only to grow bored after the
novelty wore off and leave behind while we headed in new directions.
Provisioning sounded like simple math. 3 months, 12 weeks. If we have pasta twice a week, that’s going
to be 24 cans of chopped tomato and 8 pounds of pasta. 48 cans of vegetables. 12 pounds of rice. 24 cans of tuna. 12 pounds of coffee. We also planned for things that we knew would
have to be different under way than at home.
Fresh bread wouldn’t keep for 3 months and we didn’t have the space to
keep it frozen. Instead, we’d make bread
from scratch or do without. Add to the
list 15 pounds of flour, “some” powdered milk, sugar, and honey. Onions probably won’t keep, better get some
dried onion flakes. When we’re on overnight
passage at sea, we don’t really cook,
we just want food that can be eaten out of hand or mixed with boiling
water. Add instant oatmeal, ramen
noodles, and some energy bars to the list.
Toilet paper and paper towels! Everyone
warned us that paper products in the Caribbean were either ruinously expensive,
or simply not available in the soft, cushy quality we’re used to here in the
US.
Still, making the list was the easy part. After the big shopping trips to CostCo and
Giant and Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, we had to find places to store
everything. First came the
repackaging. Cardboard never comes
aboard, both because it can harbor roaches - they love to eat the glue - and
because it can hold moisture and spoil whatever is stored in it. We saved the plastic
containers of things we bought regularly; they made nice uniform-sized canisters
for storage of bulk things like dried beans as well as anything that originally
came in a cardboard package. We bought a
restaurant-size jar of bay leaves and put handfuls of the leaves in with the
flour and rice to prevent weevils. We
split the cost of a vacuum sealer with our friends and broke bulk packages of coffee
and granola and crackers and blocks of cheese into smaller servings and
shrink-wrapped them. We also vacuum
sealed prescription medicines and Q-tips and spare parts, anything we wouldn’t
use right away that would be damaged by moisture.
After repackaging, then we looked for creative stowage
locations. One huge dry locker under the
v-berth cushions became our primary long-term storage pantry that we’d get into
once a month or so, to restock canisters of staples that were in more
accessible “day use” locations. We
tucked things in unlikely places: drawers are rectangular but the hull is
curved, which meant that there was wasted space behind the drawers. Wasted no more, that space was promptly
filled with supplies. Heavy things went below
the waterline and bulky but light things went higher. Finally, with a water line an inch or two
lower than normal due to the extra weight we had crammed aboard, we were ready
to sail to the Bahamas, and live off what we had with us.
We spent more time than we expected to in the little
islands of the Exumas. There were small
stores there; the local people had to eat something
and get their food somewhere, after
all. We could learn more about life here
by following their lead. Maybe we couldn’t
get broccoli, but we could get cabbage and kale, and grapefruit and limes. The stuff we had in storage stayed in
storage. Then we headed for the Out
Islands.
You know what the kicker was? Because of the weather, we never made it to
those deserted Ragged Islands. That weather
trapped our friends, along with several other cruisers, on moorings in the
national park, for about 3 weeks, where they happily ate and drank everything
they’d brought, per their own advice. We
were wonderfully lucky to be “trapped” by that same weather on more-developed
Eleuthera, where we had access to the biggest grocery store we’d seen since
leaving the U.S., and even pizza. Why
eat canned tuna and canned string beans when there was fresh-caught fish and
pineapple available? We never needed many of the supplies we’d so
carefully stowed, and many of them came back to the U.S. with us. (Except, of course, for the alcohol. No trouble using that up!)
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| Stowing the good stuff! |
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| Locker diving in that deep locker to get a favorite snack |
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Provisioning is the subject of this month's RaftUP (which I'm embarrassingly late contributing to; blame it on a combination of Superstorm Sandy, conflicting deadlines and some personal-life drama.) You can read other cruisers' take on this topic at:
Still to come:
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Click on the monkey's fist to read others bloggers on this topic.
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