It's now less then two weeks to the start of the 2007 Rolex Fastnet Race. We're fairly confident the boat is ready. In the last two practice races she has been on the pace. But now comes the difficult part: provisioning.
Boat catering is always tricky, as people's appetites and tastes can alter dramatically according to the weather. If it's rough you just want something easy to serve and easy to digest, basic fuel to keep the body going. If it's calm you want something more interesting and appealing - something to keep you entertained and motivated when progress is slow. The trouble is, you never know very far in advance which it is going to be.
It's problem enough when you're merely “victualling up” for a weekend. But for the Fastnet we don't even know how long we're going to be at sea, never mind what our appetites will be like!
Given a good breeze, the course should take us four or five days. If we get some proper summer weather (and after all these gales, we're almost resigned to a drifting match!) we might be at sea for a week. With a crew of eight, that's an awful lot of food!
We've never belonged to the Pot Noodle school of boat catering. An army marches on its stomach, as the saying goes. When you're at sea for a few days, it's important that meal times are something to look forward to. Especially if it does turn out to be a slow trip.
We're fortunate that our boat has a fairly big fridge. Our plan is to get it as cold as we can before we leave (thanks to marina shore power.) And then fill it with frozen food, ready prepared at home. This not only means we'll have good food to eat, it also means we can switch off the fridge as we leave, to conserve battery power, and it will stay cold for several days, keeping us safe from food poisoning!
We've agreed a menu of five “one pot” supper dishes, which will be easy to serve if the weather is rough: fish pie, cassoulet, lasagne, chicken casserole, cottage pie. And if it's calm and we're drifting about, looking for something to do, we'll be able to dress them up a bit.
We've settled on porridge with fruit for breakfast, or crunchy cereal, served with yoghurt - both nutritious and filling, easy to digest and easy to serve in a seaway.
We're taking sandwiches, home-cooked “palm pies” (so called because they fit neatly into the hand for eating on the rail), pasties and so on for lunch.
And then we're taking lots of stuff for grazing on during the rest of the day: apples, energy bars, home made flapjack, fruit cake etc. Five of us are “mature” and we're astonished how much more the three younger members of the crew eat than we do. So we've got to allow for that, too. We've got to keep their strength up, as my granny used to say!
And it's not just food you have to think about. How many loo rolls will we need for a week at sea? How many kitchen rolls? How much washing up liquid? I've already laid in industrial quantities of tea bags and bottled water.
And then there's the two extra days' worth of iron rations: tinned food that we can make something good to eat out of, if we're still at sea when the frozen stuff runs out and the fridge starts to warm up!
It goes against all the skipper's instincts for running a light ship when racing, but we're going to have to start with both water tanks full - 360 litres. That should be plenty if we're careful. But that's the one thing you absolutely can't afford to run out of.
With eight people's kit on board (including some spare oilies) it's quite hard to see where and how we're going to stow all the food and drink. But I was talking to some fellow Fastnet competitors at the weekend, and at least we're all in the same boat, as it were.
“And you should worry!” said a friend with a 43-footer. “We're taking 12 people!”
