Provisioning for Picton Castle is like grocery shopping on steroids.
When you consider that we have 40 to 50 crew members aboard and we make three meals a day plus snacks, and that we often go months without shopping for more food, the quantity of food we need to acquire and load aboard is pretty impressive.
Our Chief Cook, the amazing Donald Church of Grenada, is a wizard in the galley. Somehow, even after weeks at sea, beautiful meals appear from the galley door and Donald hardly looks like he’s broken a sweat. He is also very experienced at ordering food, so he knows what he wants and how much of it.
Picton Castle does our provisioning from a number of sources. Our two local grocery stores, Foodland and Your Independent Grocer, have been so wonderful to our crew through our extended stay in Lunenburg and we’ve purchased a lot of food from them in preparation for this voyage.
Through our friend Adam Bower, who owns the Grand Banker Bar & Grill and the Old Fish Factory restaurant (and just opened his newest establishment, the tap room for Shipwright Brewing Company), we made two big food service orders. The food service company can supply things in the pack sizes and quantities we need – flour, rice and pasta comes in 50-pound bags, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables come in tins that are 2.84L, and they can supply meat in bigger packages. We made two orders, one came last Monday and the second last Thursday. Unloading the truck is an all-hands affair.
We also did some of our shopping at wholesale stores in nearby Halifax. Donald and I took Zoe and Nate with us for this adventure. We filled five heaping carts at Costco and another seven at the Wholesale Club. We packed the back of a pickup truck and the back of my little SUV to the gills, we couldn’t have fit another can of coffee in.
As each big load of provisions has been unloaded at the ship, it gets moved into the ship’s hold. There is shelving built into the outboard sides of the hold and plastic fish totes fit into the shelves perfectly. Dry goods and canned goods are stored there and each tote is filled with things that are alike and labelled. We also have a number of freezers, both AC and DC powered, where the frozen meats and veggies are stored. There are no refrigerators aboard, but we do have two big coolers that act like fridges and we change out the ice packs in them twice daily.
In almost every port Picton Castle visits, we plan to reprovision fresh fruits and vegetables. There are a few key ports where we’ll do a bigger reprovision for dry, canned and frozen goods. Of course, we always have a buffer in the amount of food aboard so that if we’re delayed or otherwise spend longer at sea than expected, we know that we’ll still have food available. We will do more provisioning in Panama, although maybe a bit less than usual. Our next chance to resupply after that is Tahiti, except for fresh produce which we’ll pick up in ports along the way.