Provisioning

I never realized how much two people eat in two months. Or even how much one person eats at a given meal.

Through the sort of gross stereotyping common to cruising couples, Mandy has ended up doing all the meal planning and food procurement research. She's got quite a spreadsheet going and a good baseline of costs built up from a trip to Costco a couple months ago, and with that information and sufficient lead time, she's been able to keep her eyes open and spot some good deals elsewhere. We just raided Thriftway last week, for example, and came away with sixty cans of corn and beans. That's a lot of cans.

We're looking at:

• (2) cases of ramen
• (6) cases of corn
• (2) cases of chili
• (2) cases of soup
• (2) cases of refried beans
• (1) case of spam
• (1) package of rice
• (1) case of oatmeal

...and various cases of Pepsi, hot chocolate, and whatever else looks good on the shelves as I start to panic about how much food we're taking. We'll pick up fresh items along the way as available; it's not as if we're headed to the Congo, after all, there are plenty of well-provisioned ports along the way. We're probably more restricted by the availability of ice for the icebox than anything.

Of course, all this is nothing compared to what we see fishing boat crews loading up regularly at Costco, or even to fellow cruiser's lists such as Beth Leonard's. But it seems a lot to us.

The big Costco trip is coming up this Friday. We're complicating things a bit in that we're taking the boat up to Port Townsend a few weeks before our actual departure, and since we're going to be hauling out there, I don't want to load it up first. So we're going to have to buy all the stuff now while we have time, but hang on to it until after the haul-out and load it later.