Provisioning

Our provisioning spreadsheet details most of the food items that we bought for our 12 wk trip north to British Columbia. I did a bit of work before we did our big provisioning trips going to a few different stores and noting prices on most of my original list. I found that Costco did have cheaper prices on most things, but I could find soda on sale, for example, at Fred Meyer cheaper than Costco. Just something to note as you provision your own boat. I also hadn't planned for quite as many snacks in the budget as we ended up with, but apparently Jason was worried that I would starve him on our summer trip and went crazy in the Costco candy aisle. This was still probably cheaper than all of our impulse candy purchases at the checkout stand, but still a bit embarrassing for me to post on the interwebs... :)

I had a hard time figuring out what to take for three months of cruising, so I broke it down into 1 wk - coming up with a list of 7 breakfasts and 12 lunches/dinners, then just multiplied by 12 to get my shopping list. I figured 12 instead of 14 lunches and dinners assuming that we would either catch fish, eat out or hit a grocery store in towns that we'd stop in. We made it through the summer in BC with absolutely no food problems - we went up to 2 weeks without seeing any sort of store, but for the most part had no problem stocking up on a few fresh fruits and veggies in various places.

When provisioning for Mexico, the consistent advice is not to stock up on too much because Mexico has pretty much everything you need (they even have a few Costco's!). I ignored this advice because I can't stand to leave a Costco port without my holds full of bulk pasta and such. And as usual, the advice was sound - I could get most everything south of the border. The things that are scarce down here are

• Asian food sections (we have found nori, but stock up on asian chili sauce, noodles, etc)
• Trader Joes goodies
• Quinoa
• Good coffee
• Good boxed wine
• Peanut butter (available, but expensive)
• Graham crackers
• Chocolate chips
• Name brand liquor
• Assorted spices (available, but expensive)

On the other hand, if you want cheap but good rum, $6US for Castillo. Safron is sold in bulk at prices lower than I've ever seen and the tortillas are cheap and out of this world. Instead of paying out the nose for foods from home, we've adjusted our cooking and it's delicious.

Cookbooks

We're carrying quite a few cookbooks on board - the first two of which have some really good provisioning sections with ideas and must do's (like labeling cans with contents and dates in preparation for the labels falling off...so you don't end up like these guys):

• Cruising Cuisine by Kay Pastorius
• The Essential Galley Companion by Amanda Swan-Neal
• Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer & Marion Rombauer Becker
• Cooking; A Common Sense Guide through Whitecap Books
• Cooking the One-Burner Way by Melissa Gray & Buck Tilton
• Charted Courses by CFA of SE CT

provisioning tips

Here are a few good tips/lessons learned that I've found along the way:

• Check out your grocery store's bulk food section. I've found some great dried foods (falafel, hummus, veggie burgers) that are cheap and don't take up much room at all
• Check your fresh fruit and veggies daily and use the ripest ones that day (save the canned stuff for later in the trip when you have no fresh stuff!)
• Try your hand at making bread (I've decided pasta isn't worth the effort) - it's really not too hard and the ingredients are great staples to have around (I use the warm engine room to get my bread to rise when it's cold out)
• Eggs don't have to be refrigerated if you turn them over daily to coat the inside and prevent air from permeating the shell
• Inventory all of your food items in the boat so you can find them when you need them
• Provision with company/gifts in mind - we found we were constantly being asked over for drinks and it's nice to bring a bottle of wine or cheese/crackers

Refrigeration

A note about refrigeration: we decided to cruise without refrigeration for the summer in BC as a trial run. We want to be as energy neutral as possible and we didn't want to have to run the engine in order to run the fridge. I was very hesitant about this at first, but it worked out great in the PNW and it was an interesting experiment. Originally, this meant going without fresh milk and cold beer (gasp!), but for up north, I made drag bag out of a mesh laundry bag and some old jacklines so we could cool off the beer. As for the milk, there are a few companies that make ultra pasteurized variety (Organic Valley and Parmalot) so we've stocked up on those for our cereal fixes. We don't cook a lot of fresh meat, so that wasn't hard to give up. Instead, I bought lots of canned tuna, chicken and turkey (it's a good thing we didn't count on catching fish!). We treated ourselves to sausages or steak once in a while when near a town with a grocery store. I was expecting to have to go without mayo, sauces, jellies and jams when we made this decision, but after doing some reading, we can keep these without being cold just as long as they don't get contaminated with other food - squeeze bottles work well for this and we haven't had a problem so far (though my mother has asked us to keep track of this with a puke index - so far, puking = 0)

A second note on refrigeration: now that we're down in Mexico, we're rethinking not having a fridge. The drag bag doesn't work down here as the water is 80F and our water tanks end up being that temp as well. We stalk boats with ice makers and find that we are getting a bit dehydrated because we drinking 80F water isn't terribly refreshing. It's totally possible to go without a fridge down here; our friends Heather and Shawn went without for 8 years or so. Are we cold drink wussies? Um, yes. Pass that cold drink, please.

home | blog | photos | about us | our position | contact us

© 2008 All content on this page is the property of the owners of this website and cannot be copied or reproduced unless express written permission is granted.