Provisioning a Boat for a Week: Plan the Fridge First

Plan by Meals, Not by List

A shopping list is a list of things. A meal plan is a list of nights. The difference sounds small and decides the week. Crews who shop from a list come back to the boat with three kinds of breakfast cereal, no onions, eleven litres of orange juice and a vague feeling that dinner will sort itself out. It does not. Dinner on a boat happens at anchor with the light going, the galley the size of a wardrobe and the shop a dinghy ride and a hill away.

So sit down before the shop with a sheet of paper and seven rows. For each day write dinner, lunch and breakfast. Dinner is the row that matters. Give each dinner a name (pasta puttanesca, chicken curry, chilli, tuna and bean salad, sausage and lentils) and, under each, the ingredients. Then decide which of those ingredients has to be cold. That second step is the whole trick, and we will come back to it.

Lunches are cold and repeat: bread or crispbread, cheese, cured meat, tomatoes, tinned fish, a salad you can make from things that do not wilt. Breakfast repeats every day too. Nobody has ever complained that breakfast on a boat was the same as yesterday. Snacks get their own row, because the swimming makes people hungry at eleven and again at four, and a crew that runs out of crisps on day three is a crew with a morale problem. Drinks get a row of their own for the same reason.

The first-night-and-last-night rule

You are not aboard seven dinners. On a bareboat charter the first evening is spent in the base marina with the briefing done, the bags half unpacked and the fridge still cooling from ambient. Eat ashore. The last evening you are back at base or nearby with a boat to hand over in the morning and a fridge you want empty. Eat ashore again. That leaves five dinners to cook, and very often one of those is a taverna at the head of the bay. Plan five, expect to cook four, and buy the fifth as tins and pasta that will not be wasted if it comes back to the base unopened.

The Fridge Is the Real Constraint

A charter yacht fridge is a top-loading, 12 V, insulated box of somewhere between 80 and 130 litres, roughly the volume of a large cool box, and it behaves like one. It cools properly while the engine is running and the alternator is charging. At anchor with the engine off it runs on the house batteries, cycling less often as the charge falls, and on a warm night in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean the inside creeps up towards 8–10 °C (46–50 °F) by morning. Every time someone opens the lid to find a beer the cold air pours out of the top, because it is a well and cold air sinks. Load it with warm shopping and it takes most of a day to recover.

This is why you plan the cold first. Take the dinner list and mark everything that must be refrigerated. On most lists that is fresh meat or fish, opened dairy, and leafy salad. Now add up the volume for six people and look at the box. Two nights of meat for six plus a day of drinks fills it. Three nights does not fit, and the third night's chicken has been at 8 °C for sixty hours by the time it is cooked. So the fresh, perishable dinners are nights two and three. Nights four and five are built from things that never needed the fridge: tinned tomatoes and pulses, pasta, rice, cured sausage, hard cheese, onions and garlic, jars of olives, anchovies and pesto. That is not a compromise. Pasta puttanesca and a chorizo and chickpea stew are better dinners than a warm chicken breast anyway.

Two tricks stretch the box. Freeze the meat for night three at home or buy it frozen and load it frozen: it works as an ice block for the first day and is thawed when you need it. And chill the drinks in rotation. The fridge holds about a day of cans at a time. The rest lives warm in a locker, and each morning someone moves tomorrow's ration into the cold while the engine runs out of the anchorage.

Needs the fridge, does not, keeps a week without it

The eggs row deserves a word because it trips up mixed crews. In most of Europe eggs are sold unwashed, with the natural protective coating intact, and stored unrefrigerated in the shop; they keep two to three weeks in a cool locker and a boat is a fine place for them. In the United States eggs are washed before sale, which removes that coating, and are sold and kept chilled; the USDA advises refrigerating them. Follow the rule of the country you bought the eggs in, and turn the box over once a day in either case to keep the yolks centred.

Water: Two Litres to Drink, Five to Ten to Wash

The planning figure for drinking water is about 2 litres (0.5 US gal) per person per day, rising to 3 litres when it is hot and the crew is swimming, rowing and sitting in the sun, which on a charter is every day. Then there is everything else: washing up, cooking, brushing teeth, rinsing the salt off after a swim. Call that 5–10 litres per person per day depending on how disciplined the crew is. Six people for seven days is 84–126 litres to drink and 210–420 litres from the tanks.

Now look at the tanks. A 40–45 ft charter monohull typically carries 300–600 litres of fresh water in one or two tanks; a cruising catamaran 600–1,000 litres. Some boats have a watermaker; most charter boats do not, and if yours does, ask at the briefing how many litres an hour it actually makes and whether it needs the engine running. Without one, 400 litres for six people over seven days is 9.5 litres per person per day for everything, which works only at the low end of the washing figure. It is why experienced crews carry drinking water bottled and treat the tanks as washing water, shower in the sea and rinse with a hand-pump sprayer or the cockpit shower for thirty seconds, and wash up in a bowl of sea water with a fresh rinse. It is also why you want to know where the tank gauge is and whether it is truthful, and to top up at every quay that offers a hose.

Bottled water is the heaviest thing on the shopping run. Six people's drinking water for a week weighs 85–125 kg (190–275 lb). Plan the trolley, the taxi and the dinghy trips around it, and stow it first, low and central.

Stowage: Heavy Low, Nothing Loose, No Cardboard

A boat is a moving cupboard. Anything you can pick up will be picked up by the first wake and put down somewhere else, usually the cabin sole. Three rules cover almost everything about how to stow a week of shopping.

1. Heavy and low. Water, tins, jars, drinks and oil go in the lowest lockers you can find, under the saloon seats or the bunks, and spread across both sides of the boat. A hundred kilos of water stacked in one quarter-berth puts the boat down on one side and makes her sail badly all week. Nothing heavy above shoulder height, ever: a jar of passata falling from an overhead locker in a seaway is a hospital visit.
2. Nothing loose. Bottles and jars get a tea towel between them or they chime all night and eventually break. Lockers get packed full or padded so the contents cannot slide. Fruit and vegetables go in hanging nets or a basket wedged where air moves, not in a plastic bag in a locker, where they sweat and rot in two days.
3. Cardboard stays ashore. Every box, every multipack sleeve, every egg tray if you can decant into a plastic one. Cockroaches lay their eggs in the corrugations of cardboard, and a charter boat in a warm port is exactly where they want to hatch. Strip everything at the shop or on the quay, and never bring cardboard below. It also halves the rubbish you carry.

Write on the lid of each locker, or keep a note on the chart table, what went where. On day four someone will want the second jar of pesto and nobody will remember which bunk it lives under.

Gas, the Stove and the One-Pot Rule

Charter boats cook on bottled gas, usually a 2.75–3 kg butane or propane cylinder in a self-draining locker in the cockpit, with a two-burner hob and a small oven. One bottle normally lasts one to two weeks of cooking for a crew, which sounds like plenty until the one you were given was half used by the last charter. Check at the briefing that there is a full spare aboard and that you know how to change it: shut the valve, swap the regulator, open the valve, check for smell before you light anything. If there is no spare, ask for one before you leave the dock. A bottle running out on night four with no spare converts every remaining dinner into a restaurant bill.

The stove hangs on a gimbal, a pivot that lets it swing and stay level when the boat heels or rolls, with clamps to hold the pans. At anchor this matters more than people expect. A boat at anchor is not still; every ferry wake and wind shift rolls her, and the gimballed hob swings with it. Two pans on a swinging hob with one cook means one pan is unattended every time the cook grabs the handrail. Hence the one-pot rule: at anchor, dinner is one pot on one burner. Pasta with a sauce cooked in the pasta water, a curry with rice steamed on top, a stew, a chilli, a risotto, a big frying pan of sausages, peppers and potatoes. One pot also means one pot to wash, in one bowl of water, which is where the 5-litre washing figure comes from.

The single best piece of galley kit to bring or ask for is a pressure cooker. The lid locks, so nothing can slop out when the boat rolls. It cooks in roughly a third of the time, so it uses a third of the gas and adds a third of the heat to a cabin that is already 30 °C. It uses far less water than open boiling. It turns dried pulses, tough cuts and rice into dinner in twenty minutes, which is precisely the tins-and-pulses food that nights four and five are made of. Sailors who live aboard rarely cook with anything else.

Pre-cook two dinners at home

If you are flying in, this is hard; if you are driving to the boat, it is the best hour you will spend. Cook two dinners for the whole crew at home, a bolognese and a curry, say, and freeze them flat in zip bags. Loaded frozen into the fridge on day one they are the ice that gets the box down to temperature, and they are the dinners for nights two and three that need no fresh meat aboard at all, no cooking beyond reheating in one pot, and almost no washing up. That frees the whole fridge for drinks and dairy and moves the perishable problem two days down the week.

Rubbish in a Week at Anchor

Six people produce a surprising amount. Without any effort at the shop, budget roughly one bin bag per two or three people per day, so 14–20 bags across the week, all of which live aboard until the next quay with a skip. Nothing goes over the side. The international rule, MARPOL Annex V, bans discharging plastic anywhere at sea, and in the Mediterranean, which is a designated special area, even food waste may only go overboard more than 12 nautical miles from land, which on a coastal charter is never. Local rules in the Caribbean and elsewhere are as strict or stricter.

So make less. Strip packaging at the shop. Buy cans and crush them. Aboard, run two bins: a small one for food waste, tied off and emptied at the first opportunity because it is what smells, and a bagged store for dry rubbish in a cockpit locker, never in the bilge and never in a cabin. Land it at every port stop, even a lunchtime one. Most marinas and many town quays have skips; some charge a small fee. Pay it. Nothing else you spend this week will make the boat as pleasant to live in as an empty rubbish locker on day five. The heads get the same treatment: nothing goes down them that did not go through you, and the bin beside them is emptied daily.

Dinner Is at Anchor

Look back at the meal plan and notice where the five dinners happen. Not in the marina, which is for the first and last night and the odd water top-up; at anchor, in whichever bay you reached in the afternoon, with the swimming done and the light going. That is the hour the whole provisioning run was for. It is also the hour when the boat is most likely to move without anyone noticing, because the cook is below with a pot, the crew are in the cockpit with a drink, and the wind that has been steady all afternoon is about to shift with the evening land breeze. A GPS anchor alarm set when the anchor went down, with a radius that fits the scope you laid, means the one-pot dinner gets cooked and eaten with nobody popping up the companionway every ten minutes to check the bearing on the taverna lights. We wrote the alarm for exactly this evening; how to set the radius is in our guide to anchoring overnight.

The Bottom Line

You are not provisioning a kitchen. You are provisioning a fridge the size of a cool box that goes warm every night, and once you accept that, the week plans itself. Five dinners, two of them fresh and three from the locker; lunches cold and repeating; two litres to drink and five to ten to wash per head per day; heavy things low, nothing loose, the cardboard left at the shop; a full spare gas bottle, one pot on the gimballed stove, and a pressure cooker if you can get one. Plan the cold first and the rest follows. Then go and eat it at anchor, which is the point.