A month in the ocean… all about food

For me, the one funny thing of the Covid pandemic has been those clips on youtube of people frantically buying toilet paper like if the world was about to end, and the only thing you would need before dying is having an extra clean butt. Then one day, while trying to load 3 massive Costco packs of toilet paper on top of 10 gallons of laundry soap, I realized people were looking at me funny. It then dawned on me: I had become one of them…

 

Judging me now? Well, think about your last camping trip and what you bought. Your shopping cart at the grocery – full of food, packed with everything you could possibly want, just because you won’t be able to get it in the wood… Do I look so silly now? We’re definitely no experts at this, but food is always a question we’re being asked. So I thought I could use this crossing as a good starting point.

Provisioning for months is definitely a challenge in many ways. Space isn’t plentiful on a boat so you cannot just hoard peanut butter for the next 5 years. We were planning for 25 days at sea, plus 10 days in case of bad weather or a breakdown. But really, would you go with only 35 days of food, knowing it’s impossible to get more if something (“I don’t know Cass! SOMETHING!!”) happens? Of course not! And just like that, your inner prepper shows up… In a blink of an eye, it’s 2 in the morning and you’re on Amazon.mx trying to find dehydrated peanut butter with the highest amount of protein in it, cross-referencing the brands on 19 open tabs in your browser of reviews about taste and consistency. You suddenly realize you need a second life raft just to carry all the food you’re planning to bring on, and maybe a third one for a small desalination unit with it’s own generator?

 

But the crazyness doesn’t stop at the crossing. French Polynesia is what you can truly call remote. So the majestic views come to the cost of VERY expensive food. The one thing everyone who sailed to French Polynesia agrees on is : “bring has many of everything as you can! Sink the boat if you need to, but pack every inch of it with provisions”. So we tried.

When you start the list of provisioning, the real challenge is to define “how much”. Sure; “as much as you can” is sort of an answer and ultimately defined by space. But you cannot JUST stock beers (or at least I’m being told. I’m still not convinced it’s true). More of one thing means less of something else, and when trying to put actual numbers in the “quantity” column of your excel spreadsheet, you quickly realize how little we pay attention to the items we use every day. How long does a roll of toilet paper last? Or a deodorant? Sure, you drink a coffee or two every morning; but how does it relate in term of kg of coffee beans? Even though we could never buy enough cans of diced tomatoes, every single one of them takes the space of a can of maple syrup! And really, maple syrup is so much more important. Would you rather run out of spaghetti sauce, or maple-syrup pancakes? Right!? Of course maple syrup is the right answer! Until you painfully realized that maple syrup in Mexico runs up to 30$ for half a liter… At that price, it surely must be controlled by a Mexican cartel!

So our shopping process has been mostly defined by storage space. Some cubbies are perfect for specific things (tin cans for example) and once they were full, no more tin cans were allowed. It was a very imperfect system. It meant I couldn’t buy all the tin cans at once, necessitating many trips. Space can also be tricky; with me buying 68 cans of corn thinking it would fill maybe a 1/8 of the available space. Turns out 68 cans is a lot – half of our storage space for cans! Good thing we like corn I guess? But sadly, it meant that by the time I had found not too expensive olives, the place was all taken.. I guess corn is just as good on pizzas?

 

Fresh produces were simpler in a way. Availability dictated most of the decisions and being in Mexico, fruits and veggies were for the most part extremely cheap. So I sewed large bins made with leftover fabric that we had gotten to create sunshade and turned our room into a cellar. We slept for a month with the smell of veggies; a good way to quickly discover if a potato is going bad!

We really got lucky with most of the veggies. Even though 3/4 of the tomatoes turned bad on us, we were still eating fresh avocados 16 days in the crossing and some form of salad with freshies every evening. We carefully picked every single fresh produce one by one, making sure none of them had any bruises, that they were all not too ripe, etc. Carrots got individually wrapped in tin foil (which worked awesomely well; we still have a few left more than a month after) and we made sure apples weren’t close to bananas and so on. Our fridge space was mainly reserved for a whole bunch of pre-made meals to help on the first few days of the passage so we wouldn’t need to go down below for too long in the forecasted rough seas. Fridge also stored the tofu, some cheese and fine herbs, but that was it. Almost everything we had was on shelves and in baskets.

When sailing, we tend to eat lighter but more often, with lots of snack throughout the day. We had a massive stash of granola bars, pretzel bags, cookies and so on so anyone could just always grab something. Our watches made for a somewhat disorganized meal schedule, but we always made sure to get together for dinner. Ly is vegetarian, which in retrospect was really perfect! She cooked for us a whole bunch of salads and tofu-based meals that were both fresh and light. It also meant no meat that needed to be quickly eaten or cooked in a stuffy and hot galley. I cannot think of one ‘ok’ meal, at the exception of a chick-noodle soup I fixed too quickly for the kids; I just dumped hot water in the bowls with the content of the pack. It’s now been nicknamed ‘the water soup with chunks of flavour’…

Going back through our logbook, our daily menu read like:

Day 3

• Zucchini bread with hot chocolate
• Veggies with tofu dip
• Lentils “bread”
• Curry & chicken steamed buns from Pulsar!
• Tomatoes & mangoes gazpacho
• Fried rice with lots of veggies, tofu & eggs

Day 11

• Pancakes (bananas, jam, maple syrup)
• Gazpacho (green tomatoes & cucumbers)
• Salade Nicoise
• Cookies in a fancy box that looked yummy but really are just sadly disappointing

Day 15

• Surprise boxes of cereals for the kids
• Quesadillas with eggs and avocados for adults
• Pinapple, spinash & maple syrup smoothie
• Asian salad (red cabbage, carrots, raisins, peanuts)

So there : mom; we didn’t starve!

For the ones that are curious, here’s an extract of what we stored before the crossing. With a bit of luck; having stuff jammed in every single nook and crannies will save us a bunch of money for the next 6 to 12 months.

Fresh

• Apples – 5 kg
• Avocados – 5.5 kg
• Bananas – 5 kg
• Bellpeppers – 3.4 kg
• Cabagges – 4.2 kg
• Carrots – 4.9 kg
• Cucumbers – 3.3 kg
• Fresh herbs – corriander, parsley, basilic
• Jicama – 2.2 kg
• Limes 1.4 kg
• Oranges – 2.15 kg
• Potatoes – 19 kg
• Pears – 1.4 kg
• Pinapple – 6.2 kg
• Spinach – 1 kg
• Tomatoes – 3.4 kg

Refrigerated

• Bacon – 9 kg
• Cheeses – 15 kg (actually stored in the bilge)
• Butter – 1 kg
• Dry sausage – 2 kg
• Eggs – 270 (not refrigerated)
• Feta – 1.2 kg
• Ground beef – 7 kg
• Pepperoni – 2.5 kg
• Tofu – 24

Shelf stable

• Coffee – 22 kg
• Flour – 48kg
• Granola cereales – 30 kg
• Granola bars – 150 (as snacks for the crossing)
• Peanut butter – 51 kg
• Chickpeas – 10kg
• Popcorn kernel – 5 kg
• Sushi rice – 15 kg
• Maple syrup – 16l
• Milk – 4 pouches (280L)
• Spag pasta – 14 kg

We stopped keeping the inventory near the end of the provisioning, but that should give you an idea…

• Apple cider vinegar – 3l
• Artichauds – 12 cans
• Baby corn – 14 cans
• Bacon bits – 3 big bags
• Baking soda – 4
• Balsamic vinegar – 1l
• Sesame seed – 2 pots
• Stock – 2 chicken, 1 beef, 1 shrimp
• Brown sugar – 10 kg
• Brushetta herbs – 2 pots
• Cocoa – 4 pots
• Cake mix – 12 packs (cakes)
• Cranberries – 3 cans
• Canola oil – 5l
• Capers – 16 pots
• Cheap soy sauce (“china sauce”) – 4l
• Cheese fondue – 1.2kg
• Cheese powder (for mac&cheese) – 1 kg
• Chocolate bar – 19
• Chocolate chips – 9.5 kg
• Coconut milk – 24 packs (12l)
• Coconut (for cooking) – 1kg
• Cookie packs – 20 (mainly for snack during the crossing)
• Corn – 68 cans
• Couscous – 4 kg
• Crushed tomatoes – 25 cans
• Curry paste (madras) – 1/2 kg
• Curry paste (panang) – 1/2 kg
• Curry paste (yellow) – 1/2 kg
• Dates – 5 bags
• Dehydrated potates (mashed potatoes) – 20 bags
• Diced tomatoes – 14 cans
• Dijon mustard – 2 pots
• Dried seaweed – 6 bags
• Dry pinto beans – 3 kg
• Dry tomatoes (glass jar) – 3
• Egg noodles – 4 packs
• Black beans – 9kg
• Green lentilles – 2kg
• Fish sauce – 2 bottles
• Frijoles – 10
• Gatorade – 1
• GORP – 4 bags
• Chia seeds – 1.5 bags
• Soups, chicken cream – 11 cans
• Hoisin sauce – 2 bottles
• Honey – 4kg
• Hot chocolate – 28 drinks
• Hot mustard powder – 1
• Hot sauce – 4 bottles
• Icing sugar – 1 kg
• Jam – 6kg
• Jasmin rice – 16kg
• Cranberry juice – 4l
• Lemon juice – concentrate – 4l
• Lime juice – concentrate – 2l
• Ketchup – 3 bottles
• Yeast – 1 kg
• Mangoes – 5 cans
• Marshmallows – 8 bags
• Mayo – 5l
• Media cream – 24
• Mirin – 1 bottle
• Mustard (baseball) – 5kg
• Nori – 5 packs
• Oatmeal – 5kg
• Eggs (dehydrated) – 1.6kg (140 eggs)
• Olive oil – 18l
• Olives (fancy one for happy hour to share) – 20 cans
• Olives (black) – 20 cans
• Oyster sauce – 1 bottle
• Paper towels – 12 rolls
• Parchmin paper – 3 rolls
• Parmesan (fake Kraft) – 4
• Peanut butter (dehydrated) – 1kg
• Peaches – 8 cans
• Peanuts – 5kg
• Pistachios 1.5kg
• Chicken – 24 cans
• Pretzel – 3 bags
• Prunes (dehydrated) – 3 bags
• Raisins – 6 kg
• Ramens – 52 packs
• Salsa – 20 cans
• Soy sauce – 4.4l
• Sesame oil – 3.6l
• Short pasta – 11
• Siracha – 4 big bottles
• Soups packet – 20
• Sugar – 5kg
• Tomato sauce – 17 cans
• Tuna – 41 cans