As part of our preparation for the passage, I prepared a complete meal plan for 4 weeks. My inspiration came from Lyn Pardey, whose book 'Care and Provisioning for the Offshore Crew' is a classic. This helped me with the provisioning, enabling me to be certain that I would have all the ingredients necessary for a wide variety of meals, as well as having suffucient quantity of all the staples. Of course, I didn't stick to the plan slavishly, adapting as necessary to the inevitable glut of produce going ripe, or the lack of an item that had gone past it's best, as well as to the sudden flashes of inspiration and culinary inventiveness that can strike in the midst of a watch. Having a plan also meant that when I wasn't inspired I could just follow it. In addition to the day by day menus, I always had on hand a number of easy meals, which could be substituted for any meal when weather conditions meant that galley work was just too challenging. I think the plan worked well, and in fact I must have followed it at least 50% of the time. In the table below the plan has been updated to show what we actually had to eat each day.

Bear in mind that provisioning of fresh foods was done in the Canary Islands, whilst I had stocked up beforehand on certain things in Gibraltar and Spain.

E

E