shop till you...

There is something unsettling about a 20 foot long freezer completely full of meat.  Can you imagine having 25 full chickens in your freezer at any one time?  Do you have any idea how much meat can be derived from one full cow?  How much bread do you think you use over the course of 4 months?  And if you would have no opportunities for the next four months to go shopping for groceries, what would you buy?

The yacht that I work for is also my home.  The refrigerators and cupboards hold the contents of food that will be cooked for me or snacked on by me just as it would in my own kitchen.  And yet we will be having very important guests on board (the owners & their family and friends) intermittently over the next four months.  And those guests will meet us in Alaska. 

In the meantime, we have to feed ourselves and plan on feeding all of them without the assistance of a grocery store around the corner.  We will be out on the water…or asea to be precise.  And that requires some serious provisioning and even more serious planning.  It also requires a very large budget.  What many average people might spend a year on groceries we have spent solely on procuring meat.  They have been vacuum packed and frozen and placed in our aft deck freezer. 

Shortly before leaving Seattle it was part of my responsibility to find a home for all of our provisions.  We needed to stuff every cabinet full of every possible thing that could fit.  We needed to assure that it was safely tucked away in the event of rough seas.  We needed to make sure we had enough toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues to last the next four months.  And so we have 5 extra large garbage bags full of nothing but chips.  We have the span of a twin bed stuffed with only a quarter of the toilet paper that we have on board.  There are 120 boxes of tissues and 30 bottles of laundry detergent.  Cases and cases of both beer and soda are stowed where customs can’t find it all at any one time!  Every possible thing that we could need for the next four months is stored aboard our ship.  And that is only part of the reason why the ship weighs over 200 tons!!

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