Crossing an ocean can be an incredible experience; the wind in your sails, stars in the night sky and dolphins bow riding at the front of the boat. But, before you can set sail there’s quite a bit of preparation to do and a significant part of that is provisioning. For us, it all starts with meal planning.
How many days to meal plan for
The first step is deciding how many days you're going to plan for. To do this, we generally look at how long it would take to do the crossing if we maintained an average speed of 5 knots, which is reasonable for our Leopard 45. I then add a few extra meals as a buffer just in case we lose wind. My theory is if there’s extra left over on arrival that’s just a bonus!
Setting up a meal planning template
Once I’ve determined the number of days I need to provision for the actual meal planning begins. I set up a template with the number of days, and spaces to fill out both a day meal and main meal (dinner). Since we’re all on different watches and aren't doing huge amounts of physical exercise we generally eat two meals plus snacks, and won’t always eat at the same time.
Selecting meals to provision for
Once the template is ready I start adding meals. The meals are generally a mixture of pastas, curries and stews with the protein and carb noted down so I can keep track of it. I do this is to make sure there’s a bit of variety. If you're struggling for ideas check out our top 10 meals to precook for ocean crossings.
As an example, here’s the meal planners I created for one of our Mediterranean Sea crossings and our Atlantic Ocean crossing; you can download them at the bottom of the page!
I prefer to precook as many meals as possible so almost all of the ones in my planner can be cooked in advance and frozen. We switch all of our fridge/freezers to freezer mode during passages to facilitate this. If you get stuck for ideas, I've shared 10 of my favourite meals to precook for passage.
Leftovers
Looking at the planner you will see that some of the day meals are just designated as leftovers. In practice we'd actually eat leftovers more frequently than this because it's easy to make extra of the main meal and the crew can just reheat it when they feel like eating. If the passage is taking longer than expected, I repurpose day meal ingredients to make main meals.
Shopping
When I start writing my provisioning shopping lists the meal planner is one of my main points of reference. In the planner I group meals that are the same or use the same protein together as it helps me mentally calculate what I need to buy. I always keep a copy of the planner on my desktop, and as I cook and shop, I highlight completed meals or write notes about additional things I want to get.
During these shopping trips it's a good idea to look out for things you'd like to take with you that may be hard to find at the other end of your passage. As an example, here's 12 things we think are worth stocking up on when crossing from Europe to the Caribbean.
During the passage
Once we’re out and sailing I use the meal planner to help keep track of what's left. It saves me digging through the freezer and means I can easily check our meal stocks against our estimated date of arrival.
Meal planning templates for passage
As promised here's downloadable versions of the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean crossing meal planners, as well as a simple template you can use to help plan your passage provisioning. You can also read more about how we provisioned to cross the Atlantic here.
Good luck and fair winds!
Thank you 😍