First Time Provisioning for Cruising the East Coast and The Bahamas

First Time Provisioning for Cruising the East Coast and The Bahamas

As we eased into cruising lifestyle from doing short jumps of 20-40 nautical miles and having a plethora of food options to heading off to the Bahamas for a couple winters we have loaded up the boat and learned a few tricks that have taught us valuable lessons in meal planning and provisioning. Our provisioning skills started when we motored our Hunter 376 15 days from Shelburn, VT back to New London, CT. We managed our provisioning (if you can call it that) like we would at home, make a list of essentials, a couple planned meals and the rest would fall into place. I mean the grocery store is right down the street right? My how we were so wrong and this plan turned into eating out, spoiled food and wasn’t exactly budget friendly for our long-term plans. We first thought of our food consumption like camping, I think many of us do at first and try to revamp our diets into granola bars, oatmeal, 1 pot rice meals, prepackaged mountain house meals and anything that is super easy to make, this leaves a lot to be desired and you end up with a bit of stuff that inevitably hangs around the bilge for too long. What to buy and what not to buy that is the question: After our first rations of granola, oatmeal and Mac n cheese we really needed a change. We craved salad, fruits and good hearty ingredients into our daily lives. You need to consider what you ate at home, how you have cooked up until now and what dietary restrictions you might have. Don’t just revamp your eating habits because you moved aboard! we had always made home fries on occasion at home and after a year aboard we missed that treat dearly so we started to buy potatoes and make them but also planned to use those potatoes for another meal either that night or in the next days before they started to turn. Another great example of this is bell peppers, leaving a bell pepper in our boat fridge has typically turned into throwing out the pepper a few days later but after cruising for a while we would use some of the peppers to make omelets and then use the rest to make a stir fry or a curry in the evening. This plan created a use for that food that didn’t result in it sitting in the bottom of our crisper for a week until we wanted a pepper again. Meat, for the carnivores that can’t live without a steak is easy to stock up on and freeze providing you have the space. In our 2nd season cruising the Bahamas we bought a small Bouge RV freezer to let us bring a little more with us. After the first year and experiencing the chicken in some of the lesser traveled locations of the Bahamas we felt it was safer to bring along what we wanted. Unless you are a really great spear fisherman (woman) and are scouring the sea like you’re stocking up for the next apocalypse, living off fish and lobster (in season) isn’t realistic and you will quickly find yourself at the local grocery store trying to locate a decent piece of meat to eat. Most meat in the Bahamas has proven to be fairly expensive chicken, ribs (for whatever reason) and ground beef is tolerably priced at best. Dry goods. Although we haven’t followed this one yet it’s important to consider that around the world people have food, don’t overpack things that you can get elsewhere for reasonable prices. Our first season we bought 2 large bags of rice one was 50 pounds and the other was a smaller 20 pound bag of rice. After buying that rice, packing it in vacuum sealed portioned pouches we still have that original rice in our dry goods. What we didn’t think about at the time was rice is a worldwide product and you can buy it anywhere relatively easily and cheaply so there’s no need to take up the precious space in your bilge with rice when you can have a plethora of candy bars, your favorite coffee or that precious adult beverage to use later on that are so much more rare to find at good prices. How long to plan for: When we cruised the east coast of the USA down the ICW groceries were fairly easy to come by and reasonably priced in comparison to the Bahamas. After we caught on the first couple of months we started to plan for about 1.5-2 weeks worth of food/meals not including essentials like eggs, bread, fruit etc. this allowed for us to move the boat between cities and have enough aboard where we didn’t feel like we were rationing the things we loved. For us, two people since our daughter doesn’t love eggs (18) eggs would last us about 8 days because we refilled our plastic egg container to keep them intact we always ended up with 4-6 left in the container and typically at any given time we had 24 eggs aboard. This was great for making breakfast, cutlets, hard boiling them and anything else to you may desire. Larger provision runs for the Bahamas winter seasons were done at a Costco where we could buy things like bags or Kirkland mixed nuts, instant coffee, bulk creamer, bulk spaghetti, bulk mac n cheese, flour, pancake mix, etc. We did typically keep a running list of what we use and how much we had at the beginning and the end of our trip. Pancakes are a staple in our house our daughter loves them so in a season we would use about (5) 5lb bags of pancake mix. They are bought in resealable packaged bags and last about a month and a half between the 3 of us. In a cruising season of 4-5 months we would have enough to get us through and back to the states to buy some more.

Freshly baked “boat bread”

A few folks we have run into have told us stories about theirown provisioning nightmares and have had experiences of undesirable critters in their bilge chomping through provisions like its their own personal grocery store. We luckily have avoided these problems so far with the exception of 1 bag of flour. Friends of ours early on in our first southbound transit had told us about vacuum sealing our dry goods to avoid having these sorts of issues. We followed their advice closely, bought a vacuum sealer of our own and started in on the plethora of dry goods to be stored away for later use. I think it’s been a good buy for us as we have used it for macaroni, flour, meats, rice and other things. We did experiment with our macaroni boxes stored and found that they became damp when left in the boat for too long which invites mildew, mold and critters. We think it’s best to be safer rather than be sorry and plan for the worst, vacuum seal your dry goods and they will last even through window leaks, water in the bilge and the plethora of other issues which may arise.

Can good labels: Its best to remove your canned goods labels and make sure you write on them in sharpie what it is as well as the date it was stored. Recently I opened a can of what I thought was tomato soup which turned out to be diced tomatoes and was clearly written by our daughter who wanted the tomato soup in the first place. So we had burritos that night instead of tomato soup.

Sophia may or may not have accurately marked the tomatoes…

Accessibility: Ensure that you have some sort of organization to what you are putting away. We have nice big storage areas in our saloon seating. We specifically packed our dry goods in sizes appropriate for the space and stacked them neatly vertically so you don’t need to move things around in there to access rice, macaroni or typical everyday use items. Cans are stacked in the bilge with the same product on top of one another (i.e. corn over corn, green beans the same and those precious canned mushrooms for pizza night on top of each other.

Cold Space Puzzles: We usually have a bit to refrigerate or freeze. We load up our freezer with steak, pork, chicken, frozen broccoli and some Ice Cream (the ice cream is always at the bottom). The Bahamas ground beef, fish and lobster are typically very fresh. Lobster tails can be had for about $10.00 each sometimes $20.00 depending on the time of year and they are right out of the ocean. Most places where cruisers want to visit and spend time in the remote anchorages you will find that you will be spearing your own fish, keep them smaller than a dinner plate and you will be fine to eat them. When you start to consider planning how to be utilize your cold spaces consider a couple of things. We dislike dumpster dive top load fridges we had one in our first Hunter and we struggled with how to manage the space best. We found that buying some plastic bins kept things somewhat under control and they should be sized for the space and stackable. Most used items are on top like eggs, sandwich meat, cheese, ketchup, milk. By using the bins you can effectively remove bulk out of the way quickly onto the counter and then put them back quickly as well. We do a similar thing in our front load fridge now which was a required parameter of our new boat. We have clear bins which we use as draws and slide things in and out as needed it works pretty well keeps things organized and makes it convenient to use.

Vegetables: as we mentioned we take some frozen broccoli as well as canned items. The remainder lettuce and carrots are the only thing that we refrigerate when we are cruising. We eat a lot of cabbage when out we make a good coleslaw and have mastered the craft a bit most other veggies tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers don’t go in the freezer and we plan our meals around their typical shelf life between anchorages and places to stock back up. All of the vegetables in the Bahamas have been very good quality.

Freezer: we typically cook overnight aboard with the exception of a once a week restaurant splurge. We try to limit it to once a week or about that in the average time we are there. We portion our meats into a one meal amount and freeze them accordingly. We stack the meats in our storage freezer Bouge RV, Dometic, Isotherm or the like so we can pull out what we need and restock things where we find them. We have done offshore meals for longer runs and do cook for those times but normally we are departing from a location a store exists and is accessible or we utilize more than one prepackaged meat during those meal preps. These are some tricks and tips we have learned over the past couple years and we love to hear from people who have some tricks of their own. If you do have something that works really great please reach out to us and let us know.