Provisioning for Coastal Cruising

Pretty much, we’re coastal cruising these days. Sure, we’re cruising by not ever leaving this area, and we’re “cruising” while living in a house, but . . . we’re coastal cruising, at least as far as provisioning is concerned. Hear me out.

Our past cruises have been of the “go far as fast as possible” kinds, where the goal was the islands, full stop. Provisioning for such an adventure means stocking up hard. Filling every nook and cranny of the boat. Buying not one of things like pasta or cracker boxes but multiple. When your budget is tight and food costs twice as much when you hit the Bahamas, it’s super smart to leave the US loaded to the gills.

This is a hard mindset to break. I keep wanting to load the boat up even when we’re coastal cruising in the US, where groceries are fairly easy to come by. Not that GETTING to the grocery store is necessarily easy - many of them are not very close to a convenient anchorage or dinghy dock - but if push came to shove, we’d be able to find groceries almost everywhere. There’s not a lot of point in weighing down the boat with 10 5-lb bags of flour when it’s available in every town. It’s not great to run out, sure. But.

What I realized over the last few months is that there’s a good balance to strike. Having a good stock in the food lockers means we won’t go hungry even if that grocery stop is delayed for a few days due to weather or other circumstances; realizing there’s no need to stash 4 cabbages because lettuce won’t be available for months on end means we can eat a lot more variety of fresh vegetables, just replenishing every couple of weeks as we go along. There will still be meals of pasta, or beans and rice; most of the time I start dinner by sauteeing up some onions and garlic while I’m figuring out the rest. But we definitely get more fresh meat, fresh salads, fresh fruit when we’re coastal cruising.

Living in this little house while Calypso is in the boatyard is a lot like coastal cruising. I’ve got a decent stash of pantry items I can pull from, all of which came off of the boat. I didn’t need to buy all that stuff back in July! Now it’s time to eat it all down, just so we can restock (less intensely) in the spring before heading north again. The grocery stores around here are adequate for basics, kind of like a lot of the stores we find along the way in small towns near the water. I can reliably find flour to make bread, ground beef for tacos or hamburgers, or even (usually anyway) romaine lettuce for salad.

One thing we learned on our shakedown this summer is that we REALLY like half and half in our coffee. Not powdered milk, not evaporated milk, not even diluted cream (all of which are adequate substitutions when you’re desperate), but real bought-from-the-dairy-cooler half and half. Our stash of half and half became the barometer for when it was time to plan the next anchorage around proximity to a grocery store. This was problematic at times (there was a half and half shortage this summer, I swear) and, after one unhappy stretch of a few days with evaporated milk as our creamer, we started to stock up a little when we saw the stuff. Turns out, we can stash 4 pint containers in the fridge (pint containers store more easily than the quart size ones) without displacing too much else; the expiration dates generally stretched out about 3 weeks. That bought us plenty of time to find the next dealer. We’d store the cartons by expiration date, with the farthest out stowed in the bottom of the fridge.

Most other items, though, I got in the habit of keeping “one in reserve.” Flour, for example (we make all our own bread), is stored in a lock-n-lock container behind the sliders in the galley. There’s a bag in reserve, sealed into a ziploc bag, in deep pantry storage. When I get that one out to replenish the “on the go” container, I add “flour” to the shopping list and pick up a bag the next time I go shopping. No need to lug 20 pounds of flour back to the boat when that staple is readily findable. One five pound bag is heavy enough!

Provisioning for a coastal cruise is easier than provisioning for a long passage in that you don’t need to buy nearly as much STUFF. It’s still important to have essentials on hand and have some plan for the restocking. Even if it’s identifying your grocery barometer.

What’s in your coffee?