Provisioning for the South Pacific

Everything you ever /never wanted to know about our Boat Provisions 

As we plan our trip for the South Pacific, I read many accounts about how remote some of the islands are and how expensive it is to purchase things, even in Tahiti.  Everything is imported as well as subject to the high French taxes.  Rumors abound of $9 heads of cabbage, $60 6-packs of beer, expensive eggs, oats, fish, wine, etc.  There are some government-subsidized items of flour, sugar, and oil that we can plan on.   Baguettes are rumored at $0.50 each, which I personally am looking forward to!  I have read about nice variety in the Tahiti once you get there, you can find Asian foods, European, American brands, etc.  But based on our honeymoon out there, I remember food being very expensive!  I think we bought a can of ravioli for about $4.00 at one point, that being our best deal.  I don’t want to have to shop for a large crew there.  I’m great with picking up reasonably priced items, especially fresh fruits/veggies, but I want to be self sufficient for our journey.

We acquired 6-month visas for French Polynesia so that we can take our time.  It takes a couple of months to get there, especially if you go by way of the Galapagos as we plan to.  It takes a couple of months to get out of there and our plans from there forward are not solid.  I don’t want to have to provision in Tahiti for another crossing.  So, always plan for excess, I am planning for 10 months.  We had a crew of 10 at the time I did my planning.  So 10 months of food for 10 people was my shopping plan.

So to start, I made a spreadsheet of things that we had onboard and liked to eat.  We have done 30 days at a time on many occasions, so I based it on wanting 10 of those basically.  I’ve also learned, we like brownies as treats and as gifts for fishermen.  We have added lasagna to our repertoire and we love it.  We have a hard time getting protein that we like for every meal, so I have to pay special attention to the protein portion.  We almost always have brown rice as our carbohydrate, and we have whatever veggies we can get.  We don’t love canned veggies, so I don’t want to over purchase these, but if we can’t get fresh stuff, we want something.  There was one month that I served pickles with dinner for need of something veggie to serve.  I prefer to not be in this position, but if I get too many cans they are heavy, expensive, and not preferred.  This one was the hardest for me to negotiate because it’s intangible.  I calculated how much flour we use based on a loaf of bread per day, how much oil, sugar, yeast, etc.  I watched for 2-3 weeks and wrote down our basic consumption.

So then I rounded out my spreadsheet to make a shopping list.  How much per month is needed, how much for 10 months.  I wrote in the rough prices that I knew.  We spend about $1000 per month on food now, so I was anticipating about $10,000.  A little less since this doesn’t include our fresh foods.  Now I was ready to go shopping.  I asked the cab drivers where they shop, etc.  At first I price shopped and found that the big box stores were the best value? Mega Depot and I became friends.  They don’t require a membership and they deliver for free if you spend over $300.  Guess what, I’ve never been there and spent less than $300.  Prices here are higher than in the states / 20-50% higher.  Even at the cheapest stores! The other big box store is PriceSmart, which is a Costco company, but some legalities or something made them create a separate company.  There is a membership fee, a delivery fee, and less variety from what I hear, but you can get the famous Kirkland brand there.   So, I bought what I can at Mega Depot and what I couldn’t get there, I piece worked together.

Shopping for literally tons of food is not easy without a vehicle.  Nor is price shopping.  You can get almost anywhere in Panama City for $0.25 on the Metro bus as long as you have a bus card and infinite patience (as well as local knowledge).  There is a bus route, but no real schedule.  Roughly every hour they come out to the causeway where the boats are anchored.  Sometimes we’ve seen 4 busses almost back to back, other times we’ve waited for over 2 hours.  Sadly, the chicken bus (old school busses painted very decoratively, no AC, torn seats, people packed up and down the aisles, can charge $0.50 per head and get many more customers because of their reliability and frequency.  The kids and I crammed onto a chicken bus going home from the airport after literally 5 metro busses passed us by.  At least the chicken bus got us into town, which the metro bus was failing to do.  Or you can pay a taxi.  It should be $5 or less to get anywhere in town.  If you are white, prices double.  If you don’t speak Spanish, it goes up higher.  If you have small children traveling with you and it appears you’d like to go somewhere, or too many groceries to carry to a bus, prices can be anything under the sun.  At this point, you better know going rates and what you are willing to pay.  I typically bus to the store and taxi home due to groceries.  I negotiate quite a bit for my taxi; I just won’t pay the $15 that they have asked just for a ride home, 15-20 minutes.  This becomes a little awkward at times because, I guess due to theft, the store will not let you leave with a shopping cart.  A bag boy comes with you and waits and helps you load the groceries.  You tip him for this.  The longer he waits, the more I tip, making it a fine balance.  Usually it’s a matter of minutes, one taxi leaves, another comes.

Speaking of theft issues in Panama, it’s a mess!!  There must be a lot of theft and counterfeit.  Every time you spend a $100 bill, you must show ID, they fill out a form with the bill ID number, your ID number, your name and phone number, etc.  Then you sign the form, the manager comes over to check the bill, check the paperwork, then give approval.  Remember, prices are higher than those in the states on many items.  How often do you spend over $100 when buying months of food or a year of clothing for a family of 8?  It gets embarrassing as you hold up the line first by buying $500 of food, then by this ridiculous process at checkout.  But what can you do?  As I mentioned, you can’t be trusted to leave a store with a shopping cart.  You have to wait in line for about 15 minutes average to enter a store to check your packages from other stores, then another 15 minutes to get your bags back.  You can’t enter a store with any bags because you may steal.  It’s rough and makes for a difficult and timely process to go shopping.  I understand why each process is in place, but it’s too bad it needs to be and it seems like maybe they can come up with more efficient ways of security.

OK, so I had 2 runs to Mega with between $2,000 and $2,500 each.  Both delivered, dragged to the dock, loaded into multiple dinghy trips, then slowly organized and stored on the boat.  That’s half of it.  Mega doesn’t carry oats, brown rice, wheat flour, fig bars, etc.  So those items, which we eat a lot of, I needed to get at other stores.  I went to one store and spent probably 30-45 minutes trying to arrange for them to order more in their next order and I’ll come pick it up in one month or whenever they tell me it’s ready.  I explained I need 450 bags of oats, 300 pounds of brown rice, etc.  Customer service sent me to the deli when I said I wanted to order food.  Then a semi-English speaker and I went downstairs to the aisle with the oats.  They said to get what I needed.  I explained the numbers again.  She went and got a manager and we tried again.  She comes up with “that’s not how we do it here”.   Ultimately it was concluded (at least by me) that they couldn’t think outside the box.  I tried explaining to her that I needed about $2000 worth of groceries from their store, but she didn’t seem to care.  This was at the “local’s” store that a few cab drivers told me they shopped at, kind of like a super Wal-Mart; it had 5 floors of everything!

So, whenever I was out, I tried to come home with a “load” of groceries.  I typically shopped at the Super 99 at Albrook Mall.  My bus went directly there, no transfers, and it had almost everything I needed, but not in enough quantity.  I could get about 60-70 bags of oats when they had recently stocked.  This means roughly 7 trips to the grocery store, each time with a basket full of oats.  Each trip I would typically have the kids and we’d have about 3 carts worth being pushed around.  I would get other things too, like the rice.  Typically could get 20-30 pounds of rice, so about 10 trips for the rice.  These trips had to be staggered by a week or so in order for the store to restock.  It was also supplemented by Courage taking his motorcycle to other stores and bringing home what he could carry in a backpack and milk crate on the back.    I still have catching up to do with my budget tracking, I have receipts all collected to input, but am as behind there as I am on my blog.  All in all, I think it was close to the projected $7,500 to $8,000 of groceries.  Some of that we were eating in real time also though, hard to separate when you shop what you ate immediately and what you put into storage.  It’s a LOT of money, but imagine now we are living rent-free and don’t have to buy food for a year (or shampoo, deodorant, clothes, toothpaste, etc.) and don’t pay utilities.  We’ve been sailing, so minimal for fuel (well, that’s optimistic, fuel is a big hit, but we stay optimistic!!).  The government fees and visas do hurt a little too.

So, the storage is a problem.  This is where my learning curve started!!  How do you store food on a boat (wet, humid, hot, no fridge, hard to access many areas, so hard to monitor and clean, etc)?  Especially when the food supply from the stores is not clean?  It comes with bugs in it!  Where to start?  Our cockpit was filled with groceries, so I split them up into 10 piles, one for each month.  I monitored sorting the piles, the kids just got new walkie-talkies, so were more than happy to call in orders for new food items and shuttle them down to me.  I checked them off on my spreadsheet as the items arrived.  Since the shopping occurred over months, not everything made the 10-month piles, but most of the snack items and random items did.

Then I went through each pile and “sanitized” it.  Granola bars came in cardboard boxes.  Cockroaches lay eggs in these, so they must go overboard.  Granola bars were packed into Ziplocs and cardboard disposed of -- same with Jello, gummy treats, Mac and cheese, etc.  The dual bags of raisins come in a cardboard box and were transferred into a Ziploc also.  We did lots of repackaging to remove cardboard.

Unfortunately, while I was purchasing and organizing, the kids played with the piles some, so things got mixed.  Some months we’ll have bonus, other months we won’t have some items I think.  It was an excellent lesson for them of planning ahead and realizing that if you eat it now, you won’t have it later.  This whole year will re-enforce that!!   I got one of a few different treats per month (more than we’ve usually had, so we will actually be spoiled, while feeling deprived!), like Cheetos, M&M's, etc.  Once it’s eaten, no more until next month.  We have March on the shelves now and Intrepid reminds me daily about the
M&M's.  We really haven’t had good shore time, they are individually packaged and ideal for a shore snack, not just to sit and eat, so I’ve been saving them.

The kids will learn nicely about planning ahead and “budgeting” their treats, I think.  We are also more flush than we have been.  Nuts and dried fruits were expensive, but I splurged and got one can/bag of nuts per month and one pack of prunes/cranberries per month.  But they make good healthy snacks that are designed for longer-term storage, so we went there.  Not to mention the protein factor of the nuts!

These piles were strategically placed in the deep recesses of our bilges.  It was a project to get under the back beds which are basically in our swim steps, but two months are under each of the two back beds, one month is in our bench seat (I moved our lifejackets out), one month is in an empty closet, two are in the bilge below our food storage shelves, and two months were stored on the floor in the front bedroom, one of which was pulled out for March and the other will come out in April (looking forward to cleaning up the front room).

Then there are the staples.  They didn’t make the monthly piles.  Oats, rice, flour, sugar.  The oats were easy.  They were pretty nicely packaged, so 4 bags of oats went into a gallon Ziploc with a bay leaf to avoid weevils, and they were done for storage.  Rice was not so easy.  The rice I was buying from the stores appears to come with both weevils and these pesky gray moths.  In some of the bags of rice you can see the grains of rice stuck on strands of silk left by the worms.  It’s a problem when the food you bring onboard is already contaminated.  I tried many stores, but it didn’t seem to matter where I was getting my supplies; the food supply in Panama is contaminated - - maybe from the tropical environment?  I got myself the “Boat Galley Cookbook” which I totally recommend, which is where I read a lot of advice about pest control on a boat.

So my solution for the rice was to vacuum-bag it.  Thanks to Cindy, I have a vacuum bagger onboard.  I bought bags while I was in the states.  I have a friend who bagged everything she had before her voyage in 2009 and said it went perfectly!  No contamination, no damage to the food, no rotting.  Courage was asking me though, “Do you really want to pack $0.70 of dried beans in a $0.50 bag?”  So some common sense had to be applied here.  For the rice, it was my best hope.  I had rolls of the vacuum bags.  I packed 10 pounds of rice per bag.  This made, as the kids called it, bricks.  These bags are reusable, so next time, I can pack in 9 pounds or so.  By making big bags, I will be able to reuse them more often before they are used up.  Our system took some perfecting, but we got pretty good at it.  The lack of oxygen should prevent bugs from getting in and kill the bugs and eggs that are already in there.  We discarded the original bags pretty quick based on the amount of life they appeared to contain.  The oats and rice are stored together in a bin in a bedroom and I check them for signs of life semi-regularly - - so far, so good.

Flour is another big problem.  It all comes with weevils and moths.  I also tried it from many stores.  From the Wal-Mart style store, Machetazos, I picked up a bag and a moth flew off.  My assumption is that it was all contaminated.  So, for the flour, you can bake it at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or freeze it for 24-48 hours.  I don’t have a freezer, but I have an oven!  I baked all the flour that came onboard at 350 degrees.  I would buy 10 bags at a time, bake 5 together in their bags in a 9x13 tray, and then put in the other 5.  It dries it out and clumps it up a bit, but rather than add weevils to my $7,500 of food, I’d rather sift the flour as I go.  Then my friend showed me how to put it in 1 gallon plastic bottles.  I gathered bottles for months, from water, vinegar, juice, Parmesan cheese (bulk), etc.  I even asked for them on the net and got about 5.  I didn’t have enough for everything, but I got a good amount of my flour baked, sifted, and stored into plastic jugs with screw lids.  If a weevil is somehow inside of it, it won’t get out!  The left over flour is in Space Bags, vacuum packed.  But they aren’t super reliable, just a secondary plan for now.  As we use flour, we use the poorly packed stuff first.  We also just finished a gallon of vinegar and will put the flour into the jug when it’s dried out.  Eventually we’ll have all the flour safely packed.  Also, the flour is subsidized in French Polynesia, so we may be buying more there, but don’t need to for at least 5-6 months.

I had weevils in rice bags earlier on this trip.  The rice bags were just in Ziplocs.  When I saw the weevils, I would typically bake the rice to kill them.  I didn’t have time to do this when I found them, so I triple Ziploc bagged them and put them outside in the cockpit.  The weevils got through the bags into the outer layers.  Ziplocs are nice; they slow down weevils, but are not safe defense against weevils, especially long term.

So you can imagine my dismay when my boxes of brownie mix had weevils in them.  I was taking the cardboard boxes off of the packaging and there were just a couple of weevils in the boxes.  The boxes immediately went overboard, but the brownie mix was placed in Ziplocs on my counter.  For days, I watched it every day trying to look for any signs that the weevils were in the mix.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  I can’t bake it with the chocolate chunks in it and plastic wrap all over it.  I can’t pack it away all my other food if it’s possibly infested!  I’m not going to throw them overboard.  They are brownies after all.  We talked about putting it up in the front with the buoys where it can’t cross contaminate other things, but I don’t want to have all my brownie mix contaminating each other.  Then the solution came!!!  I mentioned it to a friend who was renting an apartment onshore while her boat was being repaired from lightening.  She offered up her freezer!!  I had totally forgotten about freezing things since it really wasn’t an option in my world.  So I packed all my mixes and brought them to her house for a few days.  What a relief to have a solid plan for them!!!  They are now packaged in sets of 4 in gallon Ziplocs, but after freezing I feel pretty good about it.  Also added a bay leaf for good measure.

Last of all for packaging, meats.  The kids don’t love beans, which are the easiest, most reliable source of protein to pack.  Dried beans provide protein, fibers, nutrients, are cheap and lightweight and last for a year pretty easily.   We try to catch fish, but can’t plan our diet around that.  I bought canned turkey (they were out of chicken) and tuna.  We aren’t really fans of spam or corned beef.  So, a friend taught me to can meats.  She came over with her pressure cooker and taught me everything I know (since I was a blank slate starting for sure!!).  So we canned 2 jars of chunks of chicken and 2 jars of ground beef per month (that’s 40 jars, we had 4 pressure cookers going!)!!  I’m so excited!!  This is more protein than we’ve been having!  I didn’t season the meats, so I can use them for anything.  Some people can meals, so when they are underway they can just warm it and serve it.  Great idea, especially for those mono-hullers!!  We don’t tip as much as they do, so don’t have as many issues preparing meals while underway.  I wanted to have the ground beef for spaghetti sauce, lasagna, tacos, or whatever!  This will definitely help us add variety to our meals/proteins.  Many people are scared to can.  It really wasn’t so hard.  All my lids held.  We had our first jar of ground beef a few days ago, and it was nice!  If it goes bad, I’m sure you will know.  The lid will not be sealed, it will smell bad, and it will look bad.  If meat has been bad for months, I think you’ll know.  If any of these features are present, don’t eat it!!  But otherwise, I think we’ll be fine.  My friend canned many meals and ate them for months while out in French Polynesia, and had a big feast to finished them off before going to New Zealand where they will confiscate anything not professionally packaged in particular countries.

In general, I found that dried things were great options.  We have 12 snacks of popcorn per month rationed.  Dried little kernels pop into a gigantic snack.  A little butter/salt seasoning and we are happy as clams.  And it uses very little propane.  Also Jello, packs small, just add water, make it when you have power to run the fridge for a few hours, and you have a nice refreshing treat!  Obviously dried beans, rice, oats, quinoa, etc. are healthy, cheap and pack down nicely in size/weight.  Worst of all are things like chips, cookies, and breakfast cereals.  They are big, bulky, and have to be protected.  Not to mention more expensive.  We have taken to making more cookies from scratch, bread from scratch, etc.   We are making cinnamon rolls from scratch now to celebrate crossing the equator, which we anticipate occurring later today!  Fresher, easier to pack, and more delicious!!  Since cooking most things from scratch is relatively new to me, I got a cookbook for myself,  “How to Cook Everything”.  I’d been doing a lot of Internet-ting to look up and save recipes, but without internet access there were so many things I wanted to try to make at sea, so I broke down and got a book.  So far, so good!

One final thing that I learned about, powdered eggs.  Never heard of such a thing.  Never needed to know about such a thing.  Baking more, we use more eggs. With less fresh stuff available, it’s hard to keep eggs around and available.  These powdered eggs are great for baking (from what I’ve read), but not good for omelets or scrambled eggs.  That’s fine.  So I ordered some from Amazon and flew it back with me from the states.  While researching these things on Amazon, the same company apparently makes dried butter.  Well, for all the same reasons, this sounded reasonable too.  So I got some.  We’ve used the butter in baking with great success.  We currently have eggs, so haven’t broken into that stash yet, but we have some on hand.  I also branched out and got white cheddar cheese powder (we LOVE that flavor, especially on popcorn!)  It’s not as flavorful as I had hoped; maybe we need to use more.  I tried to make a white cheddar sauce for some cooked quinoa and it wasn’t flavorful at all.  There are no recipes, so it’s hard to know how much to use.  I also got a cheddar cheese powder, which was reviewed as comparable to Kraft’s Mac and Cheese sauce.  Haven’t opened it yet.  Last of all was a sour cream and chives.  Got one, sounded tempting to add flavor to baked potatoes or popcorn or lots of things.  I am also making yogurt (still learning there too) and can use it to flavor it as a dip?  So we have a back up supply of some powdered specialty items to expand our flavor variety some since cheese is not something we’re expecting to come by often.  It was expensive in Panama, scared to see how it looks in French Polynesia.  Hopefully it’s considered a staple and is subsidized.

The final run was $100 at the Farmer’s Market for fresh foods, which we keep in aerated baskets on a shelf in the galley.  It sometimes rots, but we try to keep on top of it, eat it as it shows signs of ripening, or get rid of it if it’s past due so it doesn’t continue to set off others.  We have been having some excellent fresh stuff this week!  Our understanding is that in the Galapagos they will take anything that seems to be rotting or have dark spots and that they have even more variety of fresh items and they are less expensive.  So I held off on buying tons of hearty foods like potatoes and onions for the long passage until we get there.  Hoping the rumors are true because we’re budgeted on it!  Otherwise, we may have to break into our stash of canned veggies and pickles . . .

Overall, this summarized my provisioning for our Pacific Puddle Jump trip.  It has kept me very busy for months.  It wasn’t super interesting day-to-day, well, for me it was, but it’s a “you had to be there”.  The people you encounter, the difficulties that just don’t need to be difficult (the processes of check out, etc.), the negotiations, and the logistics of getting it all to the boat, onto the boat, organized and stowed safely and bug/rot free (hopefully, fingers crossed!!)  It came with a lot of advice and learning from my cruising friends, which I really appreciate!!  I love that every person brings in a new trick of the trade, a different style, other concerns, etc.  We are all learning, some more than others, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I’m feeling very good about our plan and approach.  Much better than a year ago (almost exactly, March 18th) when we left the US for our journey, at which time I knew almost nothing about living or food storage on a boat.  I’ve learned a lot both from experience and friends.  We have now headed out on our journey; we are about 8 days on our way to the Galapagos, anticipating 9 or 10 days.  We are looking at the equator.  Only time will tell how my approach has worked for us.  Every boat and every crew is different, but I am glad to have most of my grocery shopping for the year done at a relatively less expensive place!!!  I have heard many boats saying they were maybe provisioned for 2-3 months at the most.  That’s fine and I’m sure they’ll do great too.  It may be more expensive, they may have to eat what they find, not oats and brown rice like we prefer, etc., but I’m sure they will be fine and not starve to death either.  But I’m happy to be done.  Done with the hauling and dragging and price shopping, and time spent, etc.  I do enjoy somewhat the integrating with the people and the culture, doing what the locals do, and acquiring food is a big part of that for sure!!  We cannot cultivate our food, so rely on purchasing it.  I will still go to Farmer’s Markets or trade with locals, but love that I don’t have to go unless it sounds like an opportunity or there’s something specific we would like!

Shannon