Planning provisioning

Today I have been going through some of our old lists - medical equipment and provisioning. The medical lists were pretty standard but the provisioning lists made me laugh quite a lot. I kept a spreadsheet of every item of food we had, where it was stored and when it had to be used by - very organised! We had names for all the lockers and many were in line with the name of the shops where you might generally buy those goods, so we had Threshers for wine storage (not sure they still exist), WHSmiths for stationery, etc but we also had Bungy Heaven and Tin Tardis..... I wonder what we will call the lockers on Askari??

From our Atlantic Crossing List:

- Despite reading heaps of cruising books that tell you to eat what you eat at home - I had 65 tins of meat/fish on board - yuck! And we ate one tin of tuna and just one Fray Bentos Pie; every sailing blokes favourite (I think i cooked it for fun and Andrew loved it).

- In total I had 996 items of food for the crossing and we got through 319 - we were not going to starve.

- We had 24 eggs, 22 got eaten and 2 broke. We had 10 fresh tomatoes and two went squishy. That's all the wastage I noted and I am sure I through away much more than that most weeks.

- Hot Chocolate Sachets were a favourite - can't remember the last time I had one, but we got through 15 in 3 weeks.

- We used a whole tub of Bisto - how very English we were (that's gravy mix for non-Brits).

- We had 4 Spanish Omelettes - I remember how yummy they were, pre-made and available from all Spanish Supermarkets. Cannot wait to search them out again and of course the Iberico ham.

- We used 49 bottles of water - that amazes me as we had a water maker; and these days we always drink water filtered from the tank. I think I might have had a complex back then about tank water?!?

- The only fresh fruit we had left on arrival was "Half a Green Melon", we did have onions and carrots though.

- We had six loaves of par-bake bread - I remember hunting that down in cahoots with other cruisers in Las Palmas so thought we would have had far more than that...

- We had a whole load of items labelled SunSail which confused me at first but then I remembered we met a charter boat in Lanzarote who emptied their cupboards at the end of their trip and gave us all this strange food.

- Ask Andrew and he says we never really drank on passage, however on our Atlantic Crossing we actually drank 33 beers and bottle of wine and a bottle of champagne - it was new years eve! We actually had 50 bottles of wine on board when we left the canaries which I think was a pretty good effort. We even had wine stored in the shower.

It's a great list to have to help us get thinking about what we might need on Askari and it took me back to such a special time. So I dug out this old photo of me preparing to stow the goodies....