So, grocery list in hand, Luke and I sally forth to make a dent in the grocery shopping for Sunyata this morning. We might have been a little premature, not having finished calculations and menu planning--but the consensus was kinda let's just go and get the stuff we know we want, based on a 45 minute discussion of general menus... Then, when we get back we'll figger out how best to pack it into the storage spaces available. There was talk of dividing the booty into meals, based on the menus we had agreed on, in separate containers, each labelled with day and meal, packed accordingly, so we would just have to reach into the top of any given compartment and pull out the next meal.
However, in order to make this a practical solution, a German crew member, or maybe Gordon Ramsey, would have had to have been here.
When one is shopping at Costco, one tends to fall under a certain illusion that the packages one is stacking in the industrial-sized grocery carts are not really THAT big. And, in all fairness to the rest of the crew, I tend to think big when it comes to grocery shopping; i.e., I tend to operate on the general maxim that more is generally better. And the other one, that "if you have it you can use it--if you don't you can't".
So, eleven hundred dollars and three dock-carts later, when we arrived back at the boat, with enough food to provision a small military incursion into the Arctic, and yet still no basic staples, like rice (since the smallest bag of it was 15 pounds), or flour (likewise), we couldn't help notice that the skipper (a vegetarian who is quite happy with some rice and veggies and a piece of fruit or two during a 24 hour period) was somewhat distraught when he saw what we had brought.
The last time I went on such a provisioning run was with Achim and Erika back in 2004, in preparation for a Trans-Atlantic crossing, and we loaded a helluva lot more food on board than Luke and I did today, so I guess my acquiescence to the stuff that landed in our carts in Costco might have been somewhat due to that memory. But, on review, I remember that they were provisioning for something like 6 months at sea, for a family of four (plus friends and relations they would connect with in the southern Caribbean).
Chagrin is a word that pops into my consciousness.
As it happened, though, it turned out that most of our Costco purchases went over very well with the crew. Even when the reefer quit some days into the trip, things that we assumed would long since have gone off didn't. Things that were initially viewed as perhaps superfluous or overkill (huge chunks of parmesan, Jarlsberg, Coastal Cheddar, a case of Cliff Bars, another case of fig bars, Sabra hummous, beef and Ahi tuna jerky, large quantities of macadamia nuts, bottled pineapple and cranberry juice, etc. etc.) provided comfort during long nights and days of rough weather. One downside was plastic packaging--more on this later.
Costco carried the lion's share of our food provisioning burden--but we spent quite a bit at the local health-food store (Down to Earth), with a few items picked up last minute at Safeway the night before departure.
As it happened, though, it turned out that most of our Costco purchases went over very well with the crew. Even when the reefer quit some days into the trip, things that we assumed would long since have gone off didn't. Things that were initially viewed as perhaps superfluous or overkill (huge chunks of parmesan, Jarlsberg, Coastal Cheddar, a case of Cliff Bars, another case of fig bars, Sabra hummous, beef and Ahi tuna jerky, large quantities of macadamia nuts, bottled pineapple and cranberry juice, etc. etc.) provided comfort during long nights and days of rough weather. One downside was plastic packaging--more on this later.
Costco carried the lion's share of our food provisioning burden--but we spent quite a bit at the local health-food store (Down to Earth), with a few items picked up last minute at Safeway the night before departure.
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