Sunday, May 5th, 2002
Provisioning - whatever that means
Saint Maarten, Netherlands Antilles

Sean came over at 9am to show Curt how to service our engine. Anticipating that I might just be one body too many with engine parts all over, I decided to make myself useful elsewhere and headed off to the big supermarket here, Rams, to attempt to begin to "provision" the boat. Again and again, everyone tells us that when you see something you like, buy it, because you never know if it'll be there the next day or if you'll be able to find it again anywhere else. You also need to buy plenty of the basics since from now on we'll be walking to markets and carrying things back by hand… this could easily be a half-day adventure down here. Anyway, it's more challenging than you'd think as you never know what food you'll have access to as you travel the island chain. Also, consider that our refrigerator is only 1 ½' X 2'. And on top of that we will be trying to eat almost every meal on board, have extremely limited storage space, and we're both used to eating fresh vegetables and meat pretty much all the time. And of course, most of our meals will now need to be made from scratch.

I began by going down each aisle. It started out great. There was a Japanese food section, so I got seaweed, wasabi, soy sauce, and ginger that was all non-perishable (I thought Curt would be really excited about this if we were ever to catch a real fish). The hot sauce section was next. We've already gone through one bottle of Peri-Peri Hot Sauce in a week- so how many do I buy? At this rate, we'd need at least fifty-two bottles to last us a year (yummy stuff, you should try it- but be prepared for your belly's retaliation the next day)! Seemed bizarre to buy so much, so I only bought three for now and thought I'd consult with Curt later. Then you need to get stuff like flour. I know we'll use a lot of it, but how much? And where in the heck will we put it? My provisioning adventure turned out to be more of a big shopping trip to tide us over until I could do a little research on the subject.

I came back to find Sean and Curt finishing up the engine and having a celebratory beer (again, Sean's help has saved us both time and hassle). Curt and I continued the afternoon with more boat chores: I polished the steel and Curt cleaned out lockers and oiled tools.

We had a great time making dinner. We decided on pizza, which forced us to poke around in the lockers to see what we could slap on the pie! For now, we used a ready-made pizza crust I got at Rams, but I have a recipe for homemade pizza dough we'll try from now on (made me consider how much flour to plan on for future pizza nights?). We ended up using tomato paste, leftover pesto sauce from pasta the other night, canned hot peppers Sean and Jo left on board, and lots of Peri-Peri sauce. The cooler weather provided us the treat of eating inside for the first time onboard. We had little mini-Heinekens and read from the book Janet bought us, "Booty - Girl Pirates on the High Seas."

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