Article by Mark Outlaw
No matter how long your bare boat cruise, an essential part of any vacation on the water is making sure your yacht is properly provisioned. If you prepare well, your trip will be much more comfortable and successful. It is no small matter. The single greatest contributor to a happy crew is making sure everyone stays well fed. The concept of “Hangry” is real and crew morale can suffer if even one crew member falls victim to it.
The best plans have the ability to adapt and still hold true to the primary objective. They should be scalable to crew size, accommodate dietary restrictions, conform to storage capacity of the vessel, and survive variations in availability of supplies.
- Identify Key Details
The first step is recognizing important factors that will be your baseline in creating your provision plan. How long is the trip? How many people will be aboard? How much does each person eat? Are there any food allergies? Any food preferences? - Create a Schedule
Plan for four meals a day: Breakfast, Lunch, Happy Hour, and Dinner. Breakfast is a great meal for each person to serve themselves. To make the trip go more smoothly, have a basic schedule of who is responsible for preparing and cleaning up breakfast, lunch, HH, and dinner for each day. - Plan the Menu
Look at your cruising area and determine which meals/days you plan to eat out for local cuisine and which days you plan to eat aboard. From there, plan your breakfast, lunch, happy hour hors d’ouvres and dinners, taking into consideration the appliances on board. Creating a menu for the trip allows you to generate a shopping list of exactly what you’ll need. Based on where you’ll be yachting, identify what items need to be purchased and stored in advance vs what ingredients can be picked up at local grocery stores along your journey. Create a list of breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. It is advisable to rotate proteins (beef, chicken, fish, pork) and sides for dinner in particular. Keep in mind some meals may be prepared and served underway so make sure you have some ingredients already measured or chopped and/or simple recipes available for use depending on sea state or weather conditions of any given day. - Extra Considerations
A. Any seasoned captain will tell you; voyages can take much longer than originally estimated. Pack extra food in case you are at sea more days than anticipated. For peace of mind, bring some ration packs just in case of emergency. You probably won’t end up using them but as the adage goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry!
B. Rotate nationality of recipes just for variety’s sake. Who wouldn’t love Taco Tuesday or Chicken every Sunday to avoid eating too much of one thing in a row?! You can rotate the same 4 or 5 recipes or expand them to match the crew’s abilities. - Budgeting
Like menu planning, your budget has to be adaptable too. A good rule of thumb is $5 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $15 for dinner. Estimate $10 for happy hour cocktails and hors d’overs with another $10 for snacks and drinks during the day. Budget approximately $50 per person, per day. Depending on how luxurious or economical you and your crew want to be with their dining, that number can go up or down. Using this formula, you can easily adapt the costs to accommodate meals ashore, number of crew on board or abbreviated arrival and departure days.
Provisioning can take as much care and planning as where to anchor but once it’s complete, raise a glass to vacation. It’s done and adventure on the sea awaits!
Stay tuned to our blog for Part Two and Three of our “How to Provision for a Yachting Trip” series. Next, we will cover “What to Buy and Where to Buy It” and Part Three will give tips on “Managing the food and beverages once on board.”
