Sailing back to New Zealand means sailing long distances with no access to land. So far we’ve only been doing day hops, perhaps sailing overnight if we have a slightly long sail, but we haven’t been far from land. The time for greater adventures has come, and that requires greater self-sufficiency and a bit of planning.
After fixing and equipping the boat, and doing a bit of Caribbean cruising, the next step is to start the sail back to New Zealand. Later this week we are sailing from St. Martin to Panama, where we will wait until we get passage through the Panama Canal (apparently the waiting time can be reduced if you bribe the right people, leaving it hard for us to estimate how fast we’ll be able to afford to get through). Once through the Canal we will continue onwards into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. We only have four days left before we set off for Panama, and we need to get ready.
It is going to be difficult to provision for the upcoming long crossings. The children are growing like mushrooms, and eating us out of the boat already. Maybe it is because they swim so much, getting chilled, maybe it’s all the jumping. At the moment, they both seem to eat more than us at almost every meal – cereal and four pieces of toast for breakfast, four slices of bread with topping for lunch, and about half a pack of pasta each for dinner. It makes us nervous about the crossings – we can easily store lots of food, and bring enough for ourselves and two more adults for three months, but can we cook enough at each mealtime? With our small stove and an oven that doesn’t work particularly well we are already struggling to provide the volumes that our family needs, never mind adding in food for two additional hungry crew. Hopefully they like one-pot pressure cooked meals….
With our fridge being as energy hungry as it is, we don’t run it much, and food doesn’t last long. Cabbage, carrots and apples easily last three weeks in the fridge, perhaps even extending into the fourth week. Potatoes allegedly last forever without refrigeration, but we’ve often found them going off after a week or two. Onions and garlic will last a long time, and oranges and grapefruit too, but melons go off quite quickly, as do fresh tomatoes, capsicums and lettuce. UHT milk provides an endless supply of milk, and we’re experimenting with UHT cream, to see how it works. Hard cheeses like parmesan can perhaps last for two or three weeks in the fridge, but softer cheeses seem to go off after about a week. Tinned vegetables obviously last, but most of them are intolerable, mushy and flavourless. However, there are a few that tin well – sweetcorn and tomatoes, and some types of mushrooms. We can also bring things like sun dried tomatoes in jars, pickled cabbage, capsicums, olives, capers and gherkins. Meat-wise there won’t be a lot –corned beef is revolting, but we can just about tolerate the small tinned cocktail sausages. We haven’t yet tried SPAM, but I somehow don’t think we’re missing much…
I was wondering how Matias, who is picky about his food, would fare on this diet of limited vegetables, but he seems to have widened his culinary horizons since leaving home, probably a case of ‘hunger teaching picky child to eat’. He now relishes broccoli and tolerates cabbage, and will even ask for oranges, a fruit he hasn’t eaten for years. Lukie as usual is omnivorous – the other day he said ‘Mummy, you don’t even need a compost bin, you have me instead, just give me the leftovers’. More or less true, although he still hasn’t branched into apple cores, onion skin or orange peel. Even so, they cheer when I put a lentil and sweet potato curry on the table, something that wouldn’t elicit a jubilant response back home although I still used to serve it, stubborn as I am.
Fortunately we are starting with smaller crossings, working our way up to the big one. For the trip to Panama, Christophe will join us here in St. Martin, and we’ll head off, hopefully stopping in Aruba on the way if there is time. That will be two passages of four to five days each. Once through the canal, longer passages await. Sarah and Steve are joining us in Panama and staying on till Marquesas or Tahiti. The crossing to Galapagos will be two to three weeks without land, and Galapagos to the Marquesas three to four weeks, depending on wind. We will be able to stock up in Panama, and can get tins and limited fresh food in Galapagos and Marquesas. But any special food we need to buy from here in St. Martin. Just as well that they have all the French specialties; we can get rabbit paté, saucisson sec, smoked oysters and four types of ratatouille, which may lighten the spirits halfway across the Pacific.
There are other areas in which we need to be self-sufficient. Water and medical supplies need to be stocked too. We are debating how much water to bring in addition to the 800 litre tank and the watermaker. Ideally we should have enough potable water for six people to survive three weeks, in case the water tank breaks, gets contaminated or someone accidentally leaves the tap on, and all this coinciding with a watermaker malfunction. Unlikely, but still. If each adult needs two litres a day to survive, and the kids half that, we need to bring 210 litres. In addition to this, we’ll bring milk, juice, soft drinks, and of course beer and rhum, David arguing that beer actually has a net hydrating effect despite being a diuretic.
We have a comprehensive medical kit, and have been stocking up on extras, so feel prepared in that regard, although we are still woefully short on the stronger painkillers that might be needed in real emergencies. The first aid kit originally contained morphine, but being a Class A drug, morphine couldn’t be shipped here to St. Martin where we received the kit. The suppliers offered to replace morphine with Tramadol, which apparently can be shipped, but when we got the kit it contained nothing stronger than ibuprofen. Which is all good for day to day stuff, but for a serious injury we would have liked a stronger option, pain control being an important aspect of treatment. As it is, we’ve just got to hope that we will never need anything stronger than aspirin….
It is not just the life essentials that we have to prepare for, it is also the stuff that makes day to day living nicer. Like spare paper and crayons for drawing, games to play, hair products to tame the frizz, books, music, washing powder and teabags. It is an interesting exercise to imagine what will feel nice in the middle of the Pacific, when land is a distant memory, but I guess anything different will be welcome break of the monotony of passages. The other thing of course is that you tend to adapt to what is available, and so provided we have the essentials covered, whatever we bring will end up being what we need…
SV Bob The Cat 