Friday, November 4, 2011

Food that Floats and a Provisioning Review

We've been unintentionally conducting some science experiments on flotation in salt water as we prepare our boat to enter Australian waters. This all began with some cleaning out of food lockers - the Australian Customs and Quarantine department are quite sticky about what food stuff is allowed into the country. Any dried beans, grains, fresh fruit and veggies, and a whole list of other items will not be permitted. Given that winds have been so light and the sea state so calm, we took the opportunity today to clean out our food lockers and gather up what we've got left. We've learned that the following two items, surprisingly, float:

1. Sticky marshmallows that have melted to the bag: Reason for tossing is self explanatory.

2. Frozen chicken: Don't worry, we didn't throw out good chicken. This stuff, still from Mexico, looked raunchy - freezer burned and just plain yuk. We have done well with provisioning our kosher meat - we had our last package of boneless chicken breasts tonight for Shabbat dinner. The last of the ground beef was used for making bolognese sauce, part for this latest passage, and part for the final passage between Chesterfield Reef and Australia in the coming week. The only items left in our freezer are bread, coffee, bananas (which will have to be tossed before arriving), and fish (caught aboard). Apparently, you can keep the fish (by the way, we caught a skipjack tuna late this afternoon).

As far as other provisioning, we will likely have to hand over about 2 kilos of dried black beans. While we overbought this item in Mexico, the fact that this will be the only dried beans left on our boat after nearly 8 months is quite a feat -- we will be finished our lentils (red, green and black), green peas, garbanzo beans, and pinto beans by the time we arrive (according to our meal plan). We will also have about 5 kilos of sushi rice left -- we were obviously optimistic about our fishing endeavors when we stocked up. We'll have finished up our long grain brown rice, our short grain brown rice, our whole wheat couscous, our quinoa and our barley by the time we arrive. We overbought on our rice noodles and rice paper wrappers although I may find some use for them yet with our two extra boxes of tofu and some carrots and cucumbers and cabbage. We'll likely have to hand over a bit of extra flour, although we've been baking up a storm of pies to use up pecans and apples. Sugar will be all but gone. We'll have the last of our pancake mix next week, and eat up our dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, goji berries, dried cherries) in a snack mixture with nuts. We may have extra pecans and walnuts but we'll see how it goes. We are sick of oatmeal so likely will still have a large amount of that to hand over too.

Other than that, we've done quite well. We don't have a ton of extra canned goods left over, although we were a bit over zealous in bringing back Trader Joe's items on our last visit home in February (barbeque sauce, teriyaki sauce, ceasar salad dressing, etc.). Our food lockers are emptier than they've ever been.

And we're still eating well.

-Barb
3 miles from anchoring in Chesterfield Reef, New Caledonia
19 degrees 345.847 minutes South
158 degrees 26.979 minutes East
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At 11/4/2011 10:19 (utc) our position was 19°40.45'S 158°59.74'E

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1 comment:

  1. What's better than looking forward to 3 delectable meals a day! And definitely never to worry for lack of food on board WGD...
    Happy sailing! Happy eating! And happy tossing food to the lucky marine life/fish!

    ReplyDelete