food – A Year and a Day

Notes from the Galley

First, a quick note on other topics . . .

We always love getting your comments and notes and never more so than the thoughtful words you sent after Chauncy’s passing. Thank you for your stories, your wisdom and your kindness.

A few of you have expressed concern about our safety in light of all the hurricanes currently swirling across the oceans. Pilot charts graphically represent weather data as well as information about seas and currents by area and by month–in essence, they show us weather probabilities. We spent a lot of time with pilot charts while planning our voyage as we have a strong desire to avoid hurricanes. Luckily, hurricanes (called cyclones here and typhoons in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans) are fairly predictable. We’re in the southern hemisphere now, while the hurricanes are in the northern hemisphere. Come the end of October, we’ll begin to work our way east again toward the Marquesas, and we’ll leave the southern hemisphere by the end of November, not crossing to Hawaii until December, when hurricanes would be extremely rare. Then we’ll leave Hawaii late spring before the summer hurricane season begins there.

So no hurricanes, but the past couple weeks have been marked by many days of strong winds. After a plague of flying insects descended on us in Raiatea one night and proceeded to lose their wings by the million on our boat (we are hoping they were anything but termites), we headed to Taha’a, the island that shares Raiatea’s lagoon.

Despite the winds, we circumnavigated the island, visited an off-lying motu, climbed inland, and hitchhiked a lot.

The hitchhiking has turned out to be a way to meet some wonderful people, from the English teacher who invited us to go paddling with her va’a team on Raiatea, to the vice-mayor of Taha’a who opined about the delicate balance between economic growth and traditional life on the island.

Jason left for the States yesterday, and Arlo and Alma and I are thinking of him, Nancy and Chris in Connecticut. We wish we were there, of course, but we are spending the time in Raiatea well. In addition to doing some exploring, we’ll be catching up on a bit of schoolwork and tackling some projects we’d been putting off.

Arlo and Alma are transforming a “pearl farm buoy” into an accurate globe.

Alma and I wrote the following blog entry together—Part I is Alma’s take on eating aboard Debonair, while Part II follows up with my thoughts on shipboard cooking. Enjoy–-and send us a comment if you have the chance.

PART I: EATING

–byAlma

If I could go home for 24 hours, one of the first things that I would do is go to our favorite taqueria and get a burrito. Then, I’d go get a bagel, and finally, I would get lots of cold grapes and berries. I haven’t had any of those things for almost a year. Food on the boat is different from home, but it’s great, and when we get back home, I’m sure I’ll miss baguettes and pamplemousse too!

There are hundreds of baguettes baked daily on many of the islands, though you often have to get up early to buy them.

Hiking in the Society Islands with a baguette snack.

The differences between eating on the boat, and eating at home vary depending on where we are. For example, in Mexico we ate more guacamole than we do at home. In the mountainous islands of French Polynesia, there’s a lot more fruit than at home, but fewer vegetables… and not an avocado in sight!

The beautiful breadfruit leaves frame the bright green breadfruits perfectly. Breadfruits are a little chewier than a potato, but taste similar.

In the Tuamotus, we ate less fruits and vegetables than we did at home. And in general, we have been eating more canned stuff, such as canned beans, canned pineapple, and canned chicken. My mom is great at using these new ingredients to make something new and wonderful every day!

Some of my favorite foods on the boat are rainy day popcorn, piles of fruit, pasta, and baguettes. When it’s rainy, and we huddle up down below with popcorn… I love it! On the other hand, when it’s hot outside, and there are piles of fruit on the table, I love that too! My favorite fruits have been papaya and pineapple.

Every time we walk ashore in the Societies, we return with fruit. Here, breadfruit, bananas, plantains, mangoes, and mystery tuber, whose Tahitian name sounds like taro, but isn’t taro, which is purple.

When it comes to pasta, I’ll take it any way! On baguettes, I like to put Nutella, butter and jam, or poisson cru!

So it’s all different and it’s all good. Eating on the boat changes from place to place. We have gotten to try many different types of food, and I have liked most of it! All of the food on the boat is good, and most of the food ashore too!

I have recorded some of our food recently. Here it is:

2 Days in the remote Tuamotus:

	Day 1	Day 2
Breakfast	Walnut pancakes Raspberry whipped cream Applesauce	Scrambled eggs Toast with butter and jam Canned pineapple
Lunch	Tomato-bean soup Homemade bread with butter	Bread and cheese, with Bean Spread optional Cucumber slices Corn Nuts
Dinner	Homemade pizza with caramelized onions Cucumber and cabbage salad	Pinto bean soup topped with salsa and cabbage Corn Bread
Snack	Cashews Coconut	Crackers and almond butter

2 Days in the Societies

Breakfast	Homemade yogurt Apricot bread Fresh pineapple	Baked eggs Toast Papaya with lime
Lunch	(At a restaurant) Poisson Cru (raw fish salad, a bit like ceviche) Fish burger and Fries Ice cream parfait	Brie/Tomato sandwiches
Dinner	Homemade Mac and Cheese Coleslaw Ratatouille	Pumpkin/Tofu curry Black rice Chicken
Snack	Bananas	Bananas popcorn

PART II: COOKING

–by Caitlin

We left Mexico loaded with food—a refrigerator full of cheese and vegetables, as well as all kinds of snacks and staples. And loyal readers will remember the saga of the 220 green bananas. Then four and a half months passed before we stepped into a supermarket again. How did we feed ourselves over weeks at sea and months in the remote Marquesas and the Tuamotu with no freezer and enough electricity to keep the fridge cool only about half the time? Let the Great Galley Challenge (GGC) begin.

Of course, there’s been lots of fish, and in the Marquesas we bought, gleaned and were given great quantities of fruit. But grocery shopping has been limited to a few corner-store style magasins in the Marquesas and a few smaller, dustier versions thereof in the Tuamotu.

The shelves of well-stocked magasin in Fakarava.

There’s room on these shelves in a smaller magasin on the island of Kauehi,
Tuamotus.

Outside the Kauehi magasin: piles of copra drying. The coconuts are split and turned upside down to dry before the meat is removed to be sent to Tahiti for oil.

A stone fishing weir on the island of Huahine, Society Island Group. Once the fish swim into the end of the stone channel, they are scooped up or speared.

Anything that comes to these remote islands is brought by supply ship from Tahiti, which means the stores are well-stocked for a day or two but then can go a couple weeks without replenishment.

Two supply ships cross path in Taha’a, pne of the busiest islands we’ve been to in months.

Because of the French influence, you can often find canned paté, canned butter (actually from New Zealand and remarkably good), and baguettes. To my disappointment, there’s not much cheese besides brie, sometimes a little expensive gruyere, and a Velveeta equivalent. And the small Tuamotu stores emphasize white rice, sunflower oil, corned beef and flip flops.

Before we left Alameda, my friend Laurie and I canned and pickled many pounds of vegetables. Then I hit Costco to stock up on canned beans, canned chicken, canned corn and canned pineapple as well as a can opener, which we didn’t previously own. We filled 6 shopping carts with olive spreads, bruschetta, dolmas and other fancypants items form Trader Joe’s. I ordered powdered cheeses, powdered buttermilk, and powdered eggs from a camping supply store, and gallons of freeze dried vegetables and quick-cook beans from a website that may be catering to survivalists. Arlo liked the catalogs that started appearing at our house featuring ammo alongside emergency food supplies.

I have a deep pressure cooker that I use most days on the boat. The locking lid helps keep the food in the pot at sea, and the mountains of dried beans and grains we eat cook relatively quickly. Actually, lids are an important theme in our galley—in addition to the pressure cooker, I use bowls with lids and keep big silicone lids that will cover our frying pans. Hot oil and ocean swells are a bad combination.

Of course, onions, potatoes, and garlic keep for weeks or months. And it turns out that most condiments–loaded as they are with delicious salt, vinegar and sugar–don’t need refrigeration. Mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, soy sauce, hot sauce, most salad dressings, jam and chutney, nut butters, vinegar, oil and honey live happily on a shelf, even in the tropics. Yes, I did say mayo.

Although we buy bread when we can, I’ve baked a lot of bread and gotten good at it. My other pioneer cooking skills are a little more uneven—sometimes the sprouts grow, and I’ve gotten a few thermoses of yogurt to set. But pickled hard boiled eggs are the best.

Meals got creative at times during the GGC. We’ve had to work within our limited resources, but sometimes I do better with limited choices. Add limits to a bunch of words and you get a poem, after all, and without limits a river becomes a flood. Limited ingredients have generated new dishes aboard Debonair – the taro “potato” salad, the mahi mahi “tuna” salad, the plantain “banana” bread, the green papaya “coleslaw.” It turns out that corn bread made with masa harina is especially light, and egg salad stretched with UHT tofu is creamy. Arlo has learned to cook fish many ways, and I’ve incorporated coconut—coconut milk or grated coconut–into any number of dishes.

Yes, we do bake birthday cakes in our galley.

A few weeks ago, after a two-day sail from the Tuamotu to Huahine in the Society group, we picked up a mooring in the town of Fare to visit the beautiful supermarket. So much produce! Salami! Frozen everything! Acres of eggs! A maramu, the strong wind from the south, was forecast to begin that evening, and we had about two hours to shop before we had to head south of town to find a secure spot to ride out the wind. Everything went into the cart. Bok choy, fresh ginger, New Zealand apples, frozen chicken, five dozen eggs, papayas, bananas, breadfruit, many wedges of brie, tomatoes, cilantro. We inquired about the hundreds of tiari flower buds packaged for sale in the refrigerator case. They are not for eating.

Baguettes are delivered in the Society Islands!

It’s all wonderful–the bounty of the Society Islands, the limited ingredients of the GGC, learning to cook and eat and live a little bit differently. We have to get ashore early in the day to buy baguettes. We’ve learned to love breadfruit every way you can eat it. We haven’t seen a refrigerated egg since we’ve left the States, and we don’t miss it yet. Like Alma, I’ll be happy to pick up take out burritos again when we get home, but I have found so much more that will be missing from my kitchen.

Off the Grid on the Water

–by ARLO

It is a good thing that everybody else was huddled belowdecks on their boats as we ran out in our underwear to plug in the water catchment hoses during the tropical rain squall. Because we only carry a limited amount of water, we try top up our tanks whenever it rains. In fact, on Debonair, all of our consumable resources are limited. In addition to water, we carefully manage our supply of propane, food, diesel, electricity, and other stores.

Everybody who goes cruising on a small sailboat has to make choices and compromises about how much of what to bring, and everybody makes different choices based on what they want most. Some cruising boats have lots of solar and wind generators, watermakers and powerful dinghy engines, and flat screen TVs. Some boats have no oven or fridge. Those are the ends of the spectrum, and we are probably somewhere in the middle.

WATER

Probably the most critical of our resources, and therefore the one that we conserve the most, is water. We carry 140 gallons in four tanks. We don’t have a watermaker, so we only use freshwater for drinking, cooking and brushing teeth. Our rainwater catchment system directs all the water that hits our mainsail and cabin top into our tanks.

If we have spare rainwater that we caught in jerry cans or buckets we use it for washing clothes and showering, although the latter is not always a priority because of daily swimming. With all our normal conservation techniques, the four of us use about three gallons a day. At that rate, we have enough water to last us 45 days. Aside from rain, our other way of refilling water tanks is by filling jerry cans ashore and then siphoning the water into our tanks. We can also fill up when we are in marinas, but we haven’t done that since San Diego. For those of you who worry about us, know that we also carry an emergency hand operated watermaker that can produce six gallons per day.

PROPANE

We have two twenty pound propane tanks aboard–each tank looks like the one you have for your barbeque except it has side-mount brackets so they can be installed horizontally on deck under a special cover. Each one lasts us a month and a half. We’re careful with propane too. For example, here in French Polynesia, when my mom bakes bread (about once every third day), we always put something else in the oven then too. With three months of propane, we have a relatively long cruising range compared with other boats of our size. Here in French Polynesia, we have been filling with butane which works equally well for our stove.

FOOD (The Best Supply Aboard)

Back in Alameda, we loaded five full minivans worth of food on board. At the time, that was enough food for four people for five months. Then in Mexico, preparing for the crossing, we fillled the taxi driver’s whole trunk, not even counting the 220 green bananas that we bouth from the local banana farmer. Despite some reprovisioning along the way and some fishing success, after the Pacific crossing, the Marquesas, and now especially in the desert of the Tuamotus, we are probably down to about two or three months worth of food. As we use up different items, we mark them off in the logbook, with a map of the boat’s lockers and a number and letter for each locker (e.g. one can of tuna from S7). When we arrive in the Society Islands, we will do a big restock. I can’t wait for the subsidized sardines again. Oh yeah, and the fruit and vegetables too.

DIESEL

Debonair has a 75 horsepower diesel engine, and we carry 140 gallons of diesel. At 2200 RPMs, our regular speed, the engine burns about one gallon of diesel per hour, and we make about six knots of speed. At that rate, we have a range of 840 nautical miles. (One NM is equal to one minute of latitude and 1.12 statute miles.) Although we carry a lot of fuel, we try to conserve it. We don’t run our engine while in harbor for generating electricity; we just run it when we need it to move the boat. When we have gone a while without refueling or are about to leave on a crossing, we need to refuel. In the States and in Mexico, we could usually fuel up at a fuel dock with a hose, but in the South Pacific, we usually have to refill by taking jerry cans to a gas station (different jerry cans than we use for water, of course!).

ELECTRICITY

Our electrical panel shows battery voltage and electrical draw (in amps).

When we run the engine, the alternator charges the two 500 amp hour batteries beneath the sole (floor). When we first get settled in an anchorage and shut off the engine, we will usually be all charged up from the engine time. The batteries will then last easily for a week, but we can stretch it to two weeks before we need to charge again. We are extremely careful with our electricity usage on board. We only use the absolute minimum cabin lights, and we prioritize running the navigation computer and our running lights at night (red on the port bow, green on starboard, and a white stern light). Our less prioritized electricity usage includes other computers, our VHF radio, a fan, charging devices and running the fridge, which we only do when we have enough power. Aside from running the engine, our only other way to charge is two small solar panels, although at the moment, these don’t seem to be working.

OTHER STORES

Our line locker contains loads of spare rope. We hang it so it doesn’t get snarled.

Apart from all the other categories of consumable resources already mentioned, we have a lot of other stores on board. These can be split into two categories: spares and materials. Spares are things like light bulbs, float switches for our bilge pump, fuel filters, rubber impellers for the engine cooling pump, spare parts for the head, the galley pumps, the windvane, etc. Materials includes things like bolts, screws, lengths of rope, plywood, planks, and shock cord. If we brought spares for everything, we would sink the boat, so we chose carefully. We have had to buy some spares along the way and get a new relay switch for the engine shipped to the Marquesas, no easy task, but besides that, we have done pretty well on our compromises. Among many other items, we had the rope we needed to replace worn rigging, and the hardware we needed to make a set screw to fix the windlass, and even when our snorkel mask strap broke, we fixed it with some inner tube material.

It might be fun to be on a megayacht for a two-week charter and have all the luxuries of wifi and high-capacity watermakers, but that really doesn’t give you the full experience of cruising. I am also glad that we aren’t cruising with even simpler supplies than what we have now. We would always have to be stopping in at ports and cities to resupply. We will soon be heading to the Society Islands on a three day passage, where once again we will be in the land of plenty, but it’s good to know that we can live off what we have got.

The Bounty of Nuku Hiva

–by ARLO

We walked onto the patio and were confronted by the severed head of a 200 pound wild boar sitting on the grill. That’s right, a boar’s head, on the grill–tusks, eyes, hair, everything. This scene took place on the beautiful island of Nuku Hiva, which we have just finished a circumnavigating. Along the way, we encountered and harvested enough natural resources to feed a small army.

Up a coconut tree to reach nearby mangoes

The fruit trees on Nuku Hiva, and the rest of the Marquesas for that matter, are abundant. When we go on a hike inland from a harbor, we hardly need to pack snacks because of the mangos, starfruit, pomme citerne (not sure how to spell this, but it’s like a tropical apple), and limes, which are all just hanging there, free for the taking. It is one of the nicest things to be able to just be walking along, pick up a fallen mango, peel of the skin, and eat it whole, all without breaking your stride.

Coconuts are a central part of life in the Marquesas. The ancient Polynesians provisioned with coconuts on their voyages, and now locals drink the water from them, eat the meat, and dry them to make copra to sell, which will be processed into oil in Tahiti. The animals eat them, I open them with my machete, and shrimp cooked in coconut is very good.

Without coconuts, the Marquesans would be in a real fix. The island is overrun with coconuts for the taking, and we’ve eaten our share.

The fishing and hunting in Nuku Hiva is excellent. During a sail from one bay to the next, I let back a couple of fishing lines into the wake, and before I finished putting them out, a three foot long bonito had the lure in its mouth. We quickly hauled it in, filleted it, and popped the thick, red, fillets into our semi-cold fridge. That afternoon, when we arrived in our next bay, we made some delicious poisson cru for lunch.

My other seafood gathering expedition occurred when two fellow cruisers, one from Norway, the other Belgian, invited my dad and me spearfishing for octopus. We climbed into the dinghy, anchored in about 6 feet of water, put on our masks, snorkels, and fins, and grabbed the two spearguns. Now, I had never touched a speargun in my life before, but I was explained how it works. You put the spear into the gun, and slide it back until it clicks. Then, with the safety on, you brace the butt of the gun against yourself, and pull back the rubber into to the notch. Then just dive down, flick the safety off, and pull the trigger. So we split up into teams of two, each with a speargun. You swam around, diving down to peer into likely looking holes and crevices for octopus. I saw the first one, so I called over my buddy, the Belgian guy. He dove down, shot the octopus, and pulled it out of the cave. Once we had gotten four, we went to a small beach, and each of us tied a two-foot long string to our octopus, and beat it against a rock until it had doubled in length, to soften it up. After beating the juice out with a mallet and removing the innards, eyes, and beak, we washed them in water, then boiled them for 30 minutes. After slicing and sauteeing them in olive oil and garlic, we declared them excellent eating. Both my dad and I liked spearfishing so much that we are now building our own “Hawaiian sling” to shoot the spears.

The local Marquesans also hunt the wild boars that live on the islands that were brought by Europeans, like I mentioned earlier. We ate lunch at one family’s house and the guy that lived there had just returned from a boar hunt, in which his dog had tracked down a boar, chased it to him, then he stabbed it with a knife, and then the dog had chased it until it collapsed. Then he walked home with a dead, 200 pound boar, sliced off the head, and put it on the grill, and was in the process of lighting the grill as we walked in. The locals here use all the parts of a pig. They roast most of it, and then make a paté out of the brain, liver, and heart. Unfortunately, my parents won’t let me go on a boar hunt.

With all of this readily available food, you can eat as much as you like, for free. I can easily see how people have lived and thrived on these islands for 1,000 years. We’re eating our fill now before we head to the Tuamotu archipelago, whose low coral atolls offer coconuts and fish, but no fruit and definitely no boar liver paté.

And a few other recent shots around the island:

We hiked to a waterfall and ate lunch at this beautiful pool before we swam across it, behind some rocks to the falls.

Pacific Mexico Food Roundup

–by Arlo

When we left home, we left our favorite taqueria, Ramiro and Sons. I have always loved Mexican food in California. AInd though Mexican food in Mexico is very different from California’s Mexican food, it is at least as tasty as California’s Mexican food, and it has much more variety than what you will find in a taqueria in the Bay Area. Here is a roundup of all the Mexican food that we ate from Ensenada to Bahia Tenacatita.

As we walked up the streets of La Cruz, I was going crazy with all of the yummy looking taco shops on the street. What you come accross most of in Pacific Mexico is tacos and quesadillas. We have eaten fish tacos (pesca), octopus tacos (pulpo), shrimp tacos (camaron), and countless more. My personal favorite was from a resturant in La Cruz, called “La Silla Roja”. Not surprisingly, it had red chairs. Their street-side tables seemed like the best place to be in the world when you sat down at 8 p.m. as the heat of the day was turning into the cooler evening. Their best dish (in my opinion), was the “quesadilla mamalona”. This tasty morsel was 8 or 10 inches long and stuffed to the brim with your choice of asada, adobada, or chorizo. I tried all three, and they were all equally delicious.

The other thing which they have quite a lot of in Mexico is seafood. In San Quintin, we had fresh clams, and in San Jose del Cabo, I tried octopus in the form of the above mentioned tacos, and decided that it was a new favorite. Shrimp are plentiful, appearing everywhere from quesadillas to el “rollo del mar,” a bacon-wrapped fish fillet stuffed with shrimp and doused in rich, creamy, almond sauce. The Mexicans use spear, net, and longline to catch fish from their pangas, or fiberglass boats. It is a common sight in pacific Mexico to see the pangueros, or fishermen, walking up from their boats to a palapa resturant on the beach, and then cleaning the fish that you ordered right there in front of the resturant.

The food just got better and better as we went south, and when we got to La Cruz, we found a paleteria, or ice cream shop that we discovered to have very good ice cream cones as well as paletas, which this shop sold as a tasty combination of chocolate and ice cream on a popsicle stick.

With this much variety in food, I invariably ended up trying some new things. Some of them I came to love, like tomatillas, which taste like a sweeter green tomato, chayote squash, and octopus. trying some of these new things led to some of the best eating experiences so far on the trip. Some of the new things that I tried, I didn’t love quite as much, like de-spined, cooked, cactus, and some odd little seedpods that roadside venders were selling, called guamachiles. We came upon these little seedpods on a road trip to the mountain town of San Sebastian in a rented car. On the way up, our curiosity got the better of us, and we bought a big bag, full to the brim. We first disliked them, then we came to think of them as half-decent, and then they fell out of favor once more. But some of the new foods I straight up disliked, for some inexplicable reason, such as mole, an unsweetened chocolate sauce often served with chicken. Looking back at my whole food experience in Mexico so far, I am more than satisfied, but I would not go as far as to say that I am satiated, and I could probably handle a couple more paletas just fine.