🎧Provisioning to Cross an Ocean

The whole idea seems daunting. You are in charge of ensuring there is lots to eat once you set off to cross the Pacific.

But what is enough? And how do you ensure you and the crew will enjoy the meals you prepare once you have been at sea for three or even four weeks.

Lin Pardey shares her hard-earned secrets to help you feel more comfortable as you prepare for your first ocean passage.

Links:

Care and Feeding of Sailing Crew

The Boat Galley Cookbook

The Boat Galley Guide to Storing Food without Refrigeration

Pardey Offshore Sailing Video Series

Prefer to read? See transcript below.

Sponsor: The Boat Galley Guide to Storing Food without Refrigeration Have truly great meals with fresh produce, meat, butter, cheese, eggs and more, even if you don’t have a refrigerator or it’s tiny. Coupon code for $1 off: PODCAST

Music: “Slow Down” by Yvette Craig

Transcript:

As I am preparing to set off from New Zealand towards Fiji in three days, the subject of this podcast has special relevance to me. I am busy going over the provisions on board, finding space for last minute additions and trying to think of anything I may have forgotten because once we leave New Zealand, we will be visiting small island communities in Vanuatu and elsewhere, communities where little will be available to add to my offshore provisions.

Buying sufficient stores for any voyage takes planning and can make the difference between pleasant living on board or just getting there. I refrain from saying “pleasant eating” because “stores” includes much more than just food. Toilet paper, flashlight batteries, bicarbonate of soda, Band-Aids, dish soap are all stores, and on most voyages I’ve been on, they’ve been the responsibility of the cook or whoever is assigned the job of buying food.

When it became clear that we were really going to get off on our first long voyage, I went to the library, borrowed all the cruising books I could find, and read their stores lists. Not one seemed fully suited to our plans. They had different tastes, more or less money to spend, more or less galley space, and so on.

So, for the six months before we actually bought stores for our first long voyage, I kept a list of everything we bought for our house that wasn’t main-course food. I kept track of the amount of jam, Worcestershire sauce, flour, and even dish soap we used. I found items on my list such as toothbrushes, Scotch tape, toothpicks, black mending thread, erasers, and flashlight bulbs. This 6-month survey revealed the shocking amount of peanut butter we consumed.

At the same time, we started a custom we call “Can Night.” At least one night a week, we ate a meal prepared from canned or packaged goods such as we might have had left after a week or two at sea. This gave us a chance to see which canned goods we liked and which we didn’t. It helped us avoid the problem of buying a case of canned stew that we hated but couldn’t afford to throw away. “Can Night” also gave me a chance to come up with some good atsea meals before we were actually at sea. We’ve continued this practice as we’ve cruised. Soon after we arrive in each new country, I buy some of the local canned, packaged or freeze-dried products and try them out. If the goods aren’t labeled in English, I open them for snacks or lunch so that I don’t ruin a main meal if the contents aren’t to our liking. I’d say our success rate on foreign goods has been 50/50.

It is well worth taking the time to look at prices, sizes, and contents of different packages in different stores. I’ve found that supermarkets often have lower prices than cash-and-carry firms, especially if they package their own brand-name products. Supermarkets also tend to carry more individual-serving-size cans than cash-and-carry shops, chandlers, or wholesalers do. But try any new brand before you stock up.

Some freeze-dried products provide excellent results, take up little space, and are lightweight. But there is a catch: They require extra water, fuel, and preparation time. Before you invest too heavily in these, try any you think you’d like. Several times in our foreign cruising, people from other boats have offered to trade leftover freeze-dried products in 5-pound cans. Their crew has simply grown tired of them.

Economy sizes have no place on a boat with a crew of fewer than five. A small container of dish soap is easier to handle and easier to store. If it breaks open, it makes less of a mess. Noodles in meal-size packages are the only way to go; unused noodles attract weevils and mold. Leftovers are difficult to keep on board at sea. A can just large enough for one meal means you can clean up the galley without having to find a way to preserve half a can of corn. Evaluate the different types of packaging. Cans are heavy and require more space than flexible foil packages, but they protect the contents better. I buy coffee that comes in well-sealed foil bags, but if I plan to keep it longer than three or four months, I purchase canned coffee instead. I buy sugar, flour, and rice in 3- or 5-pound bags; then I seal each one in two plastic bags, one inside the other. This way, if one package of rice or sugar goes bad or breaks, I haven’t lost my whole supply.

Avoid large, flexible plastic containers for such things as cooking oil, syrup, and mayonnaise. If you can press your finger and cause an indentation in the container, it might break under the conditions in a storage locker during a gale at sea. I speak from experience. I had to clean out a whole can locker, Larry’s tool locker, and the bilge when a plastic pint container of cooking oil split and spilled. Glass is much safer. To date, I have never broken a glass container—either while it was stored or when I was using it on board.

As freight and commodity prices rise, plus the demand for single meal servings, more products are being packaged in lightweight containers. Although I like the ease of storage and the lighter weight of nonglass and nonmetal containers, I have found that longevity has been compromised.

Paper-covered foil packets used for instant soups, sauces, and pudding mixes tend to allow moisture into the products after three or four months. Therefore, I package half of my voyaging supply in heavy-duty plastic bags to ensure a longer shelf life. For this purpose, I find Ziploc-style plastic bags indispensable and preferable to having a vacuum storage-bag system on board, especially as the Ziplocs are reusable and readily available in most reprovisioning ports.

Wax-coated cardboard containers such as those used for long-life milk, casks of wine, and some sauces are prone to leaking if they are allowed to shift in the lockers. The wax gets chafed off the corners and spoilage soon follows. Furthermore, temperatures above 75 degrees F soften the wax and make it porous. These containers should be stored low in the boat and packed tightly to ensure the longest possible life.

Once the initial product-and-price research is over, how do you do your actual list planning? After the first time, few of these people make a detailed shopping list. Instead, most seem to use a method similar to ours. I go to the shops I’ve found to be the best value and buy main-course items for the length of our voyage plus 50 percent. I figure on four eggs equaling one can. I stock up more on corned beef than I do on ham because I know of more uses for corned beef. I buy at least 24 cans of stewing beef because it can be used several different ways.

Next, I purchase fruit and vegetables (canned), rice, powdered potatoes, flour, pasta, peanut butter, jam, and nonfood items to cover the same number of days. I take this all back to the boat and store it. This way, I can see how much space I have left. I then go back to the shops and buy luxury items to fill the empty spaces: tins of nuts, canned pâté, Brie, candy, dried fruits—what we call “fun foods.” These add variety to our menu as we cruise.

My final purchase is 12 complete, very-easy-to-prepare meals, which I store in the most accessible place possible. These include meals such as hot dogs and baked beans, chicken in cream sauce, and beef and mushroom stew—each of which can be simply opened and heated in one pan—for those times when it’s too rough for anything else. Fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat are the last things we buy. I wait until the last possible day to pick them out. Other than potatoes and onions, I consider these to be in excess of the amount of food planned for the voyage.

When the boat is full to the brim and I can’t think of anything I’ve forgotten, I take a stroll through one or two markets and drugstores, looking at each item they sell. This often jolts my memory or else reassures me that we haven’t forgotten anything. If the voyage is going to be a long one, I use this chance to buy a few surprise gifts for any birthdays on board or just joke items that might perk up an otherwise depressing day.

If you are stocking up in a foreign country, making a stores list is more difficult. A good cookbook that describes vegetables and foods from all parts of the world and suggests ways to use them is invaluable. But no book tells you what is inside foreign cans, so be extra careful to try canned goods before buying by a caseload. In 50 percent of the world’s countries, labels are in English, but where they aren’t, it pays to find a local person to go shopping with you and describe the contents. Japan presented a special problem. All labels were in kanji (Japanese characters), and the pictures on the labels didn’t resemble anything I knew. An English-speaking Japanese friend tried to help as much as she could, but beyond the language barrier was a culture barrier. She couldn’t imagine why I was disappointed when a can of what was described as fruit cocktail contained ¹/₄ fruit, ³/₄ unflavored-gelatin cubes. If all else fails in a foreign country, look for Chinatown. Almost all goods shipped from China have labels in English.

One thing will soon become obvious as you cruise abroad. Cost and local buying habits preclude eating the same way you do at home. Your stores list for offshore passages will change if you are stocking up in an island economy, where all imports are expensive, or if you are in a third world economy like Papua-New Guinea, where canned peaches cost five times what a pound of beefsteak does.

And finally some advice: overbuy. Fill the boat to the brim. When you see stores you like, buy them. They might not be available in the next country you visit. Keep the boat full and refill it every chance you get. Full lockers in port means freedom from that endless round of shop, cook, wash the dishes and clothes, shop, cook . . .  having extra food on board means you are free to change your plans, extend your stay at a deserted island, and avoid civilization for just that extra bit of time that will make your cruise a joy.

Note – As we were sailing through the Pacific three years ago, a fellow cruiser commented – “Our freezer was packed full when we set sail. Ate almost like we did at home. We never used any of our canned and freeze-dried stuff so I am thinking of giving most of it away when we get to New Zealand.” Though I urged her to reconsider this idea, she and her partner went ahead with “lightening ship.”  Unfortunately, the heat, the rougher sailing of the Indian Ocean overtaxed their refrigeration. It failed four days out of Cocos Keeling Island. Left with insufficient non-refrigerated provisions they were forced to change their sailing plans dramatically, returning to Australia against very strong tradewinds.

Even with the most dependable of refrigeration systems, it is prudent to carry at least 30 days worth of packaged and canned meals on board.

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