Northern Light - Without a fridge

There’s a lot of advice out there for provisioning a boat to do a long journey. In the last few months I’ve been given several books, watched YouTube clips, and talked to many people. One piece of advice always stands out as being especially sensible: if you wouldn’t eat it at home, don’t take it with you.

Well, no offence to all the experts. But when I’m at home my diet is predominantly fresh meat, fish, full fat dairy products, salad, and the best wine we can reasonably afford. And there is pretty much no way we can take any of that with us, because we won’t have a fridge. Let alone a freezer, which seems to be a must-have gadget for everyone in our pontoon-neighbourhood. It’s raised a good many eyebrows, and even hands flung up in horror - ‘how CAN you???’ But our skipper wants us to be cautious about our batteries, and he is what I think of as a sailor’s sailor - 100% focused on preparing the boat to do its job of getting us across an ocean. I’m in charge of provisioning, and we agreed early on that we would provision for No Fridge.

I put this out on social media with a photo of our first big shop. I like food, and don’t want to serve tedious repetitive fare that will bore or depress the crew. It really lit a spark among some friends back home and I got a lot of enthusiastic suggestions; the best way to pickle vegetables, how to keep a yoghurt culture going, and how to dip cheeses in wax… I’m actually not sure I’ll be doing any of these things, and I’m afraid I DO have an awful lot of things on board that we wouldn’t eat at home. But I’ve so far found that this can be OK - rye bread for example looks and feels like insulation material, but down the Bay of Biscay I had some when I was feeling queasy and it settled my stomach nicely. We never stock corned beef at home, but its turned out the skipper loves it and has probably wished we would. At home I would prose on self-consciously about the necessity of making fresh custard from scratch, but oh the joy of rediscovering the nostalgic, ersatz warmth of Birds Eye. The high nutritional spot of the journey from Madeira was unquestionably Ovaltine.

Of course we’ve got all the long-lived items that I’m sure everyone has - onions, garlic, cabbage, hard cheeses, salamis, tinned fish, tortilla bread, and spices galore. But I would challenge people to maybe take one or two items that they ‘would never eat at home’- it can be a nice surprise!