Keeping Things Tasty—A 36,000-Mile Lesson In Provisioning

Fresh dandelion green salad, hand-picked on South Georgia.

Five dollars for a tiny jar of mustard? Four-fifty for a wilted head of iceberg lettuce? My then 11-year old son Porter and I looked around the store in disbelief. We had made a terrible mistake.

A month earlier we had been in Europe, where we enjoyed the luxury of regular visits to the patisserie in France and the carniceria in Spain. Though the boat was well-stocked for the trans-Atlantic, we had not prepared for the price of food and lack of selection in the Caribbean.

Cruising magazines and the internet are packed with delicious recipes for coastal cruising and offshore voyages but what is harder to find is a recipe for rationing and planning for remote locations.

This is the first of a two-part series in which I will share some of the lessons I learned about provisioning and food storage while sailing over 36,000 miles—from Europe, around South America, back to Europe and home to New England—since making Sila, a Boréal 47, our home nearly three years ago.