Cookin' and rollin'

Here is the truth about offshore sailing: mostly, it's about sleeping and eating. Someone said that sailing is weeks of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror, and I have to say it is a rather accurate description, especially on a tradewinds passage like the one we are about to embark on. When you are stuck on a boat for 2 to 3 weeks, your life suddenly starts to revolve around food a lot more. So here is a bit of information on what happens in the galley when it's crossing time.

My favorite sous-chef

First comes a good amount of planning to decide how much we will have to buy. For passages over 5 days, I make a menu plan with one hot meal per day. Why only one meal a day? You don't spend as many calories when you're at sea as when you're on shore, since you do a lot less of moving around (except if the weather is rough, but then most people don't feel like eating anyway), and it rarely happens that everyone is awake at the same time, so I find it best to prepare a meal for everyone at the sunset change of watch (usually 7pm). Dinner is sometimes the only time of the day when the whole crew gets together. For breakfast and lunch there is always plenty in the fridge to prepare salads/sandwiches/eggs and bacon, etc.

Second step is provisioning (always my favorite. Not.). That involves multiple trips to the supermarket and 4 to 5 shopping carts full of food and water bottles, then finding space in the boat to stow it all away. Keep in mind that a sailing boat at sea rarely remains horizontal for more than a few seconds, so that has to be taken into account while organizing provisions, especially in the fridge. In spite of being extremely careful there is always a fun moment during the trip when you find out that 12 eggs have just escaped from their box and cracked all over the fridge and floor. Which is why paper towels are also on that shopping list of mine.

We are lucky to have a big freezer on Tilly Baby, so I usually prepare 6 to 10 meals in advance and freeze them for rough days (when it sometimes become impossible to cook so much as pasta) or for the second half of the passage, when you start running out of vegetable. For this trip this is what we have waiting in the freezer: thai chicken curry, cooked vegetable, beef stew, bolognese sauce, chili con carne and chicken orzo soup. And lots of meat, sausages, bacon, fruit, bread. I rarely buy fish before a passage, since my captain is always so efficient at catching tuna and mahi mahi (mostly wishful thinking).

The Bens so proud of our first tuna on the last crossing

On top of the planned meals for the menu, I always keep on board "survival food", just in case the passage took longer than planned - mostly pasta, rice, couscous, tons of tinned diced tomatoes and pesto.
Snacks are also an essential part of provisioning: when you're on watch from 1am to 4am, you need some kind of food that will keep you awake and that requires little or no preparation - granola bars, nuts, dried fruit and instant soups.
And then there are a few things that are absolutely necessary to keep the chef happy (and if the chef is not happy, nobody is happy): dark chocolate (loads) and dark chocolate digestive biscuits. I always hide a few extra packs in random spots around the boat so the boys cannot finish them all before the trip is over. Camille gets her personal stash of Milka chocolate as well.

Man-breakfast

Cooking while at sea is always a bit of an adventure. I am lucky enough that I don't get seasick, but most people have a hard time spending over an hour in the galley above the hot stove while the boat heels, or even worse, rolls. At least when you're healing, you know everything will fall down on one side of your countertop. When you roll, everything falls on one end of the countertop, then on the other side, then back on the other side - you get the idea. The stove itself is gimballed, which means it moves with the boat, so once the pots and pans are secured with special fiddles they usually don't move around too much. It did happen a few times that I had to hold a pot with both hands while trying to balance myself the entire time it took for the water to boil and the pasta to cook. Fun times.

Cooking in progress

Eating while at sea can also be a bit of an acrobatic feat. We almost never use a table (where plates wouldn't stay in place for too long anyway), and prefer to eat in the cockpit so we can keep company to the person on watch. Except when it's really too cold and we leave the captain to eat out alone.

Cold?

As I think I mentioned in a post about our last crossing, after about 10 days all you can think about is the first meal you will have when you arrive on shore, and most importantly, the first cocktail you will have. On this trip I can already tell you what it will be: a painkiller at the Admiral's Inn in Nelson's Dockyard.

End of crossing mojitos in Gib

End of passage painkiller at Soggy Dollar Bar, Jost van Dyke

And here are some more sunset pictures from our trip to the Canaries, just in case you didn't get enough in the last post. Sunsets are cool though, everyone should take time to watch one once in a while.