Provisioning Cost

In our previous post we looked at all those items we purchased beyond the large systems we had installed at the boat yard. In this post we look at how we provisioned for our first season.

Provisioning is a term the cool kids like to use to describe the process of buying consumables for a pending journey aboard a boat. Typically people will refer to food and drink, but you can also consider cleaning supplies, paper towel, toilet paper, etc.

Provisioning is at times both a rewarding and frustrating activity. You will likely enjoy the fact that you’re getting ready to head off on a long-planned adventure and you are visualizing how or when you will be using these items that you’re buying. At the same time though, you may also dread the amount of money you’re spending or don’t have easy access to a store that will provide you with all you need.

In our case, we slowly accumulated things over a protracted period of time in the four main areas where the boat sat, with a few big grocery purchases right before we left Florida. After taking possession of the boat in Key Largo, we started to buy household supplies, but not really any long term planning for food. It was really just cleaning tools and products. While in Harbor Towne Marina, we bought a few more items, and started to accumulate some dry and canned goods. Once we moved up to The Lake Worth Lagoon, we made our biggest purchases of food as that was out last chance to provision before crossing to The Bahamas. We had previously posted about it here. After we crossed, we did continue to buy fresh food items from time to time as we wandered ashore.

The stores we shopped at while in Florida were Costco, Publix and Winn Dixie based on their proximity to us and whether we had access to a car. The bulk coming from Costco (see what I did there).

Here’s the big list right from our spreadsheet, separated into both “food” items and “provisioning” items. We consider “food” items to be those things we would have even if we never left the dock, and “provisioning” those items we bought specifically because we were heading to The Bahamas for 5 months (or more). And yes, we categorized booze as a “food item”.

The cost for all those items we called provisions, comes in at approximately $2200. Overall I think we did a fairly good job for our first time out, but since we are still eating some of the canned food we bought for this trip, there are likely some lessons learned for our next time. One of the interesting things we realized is that we bought the wrong kind of alcoholic drinks.

We grabbed one bottle of all the primary alcohol types in “Costco size” amounts so they would last as long as possible. When we got back, the big bottle of Jack Daniels was about half gone; the bottle of “Vodka” brand vodka that we used as fish killer and a few times in drinks was about a 1/3 gone (If we had caught more than one fish we would have used more!); the gin wasn’t touched; and the spiced rum was gone early on after a night of Pain Killers with friends. John gave all the remaining liquor to the guys at Just Catamarans who were fixing our lightning damage before we headed back to Canada with our boat gear.

We grabbed as much beer as we thought we needed before heading over, as we knew it would be much more expensive in The Bahamas. We bought 138 beer in Florida, which should have easily lasted us, and the occasional guest, for 5 months or more based on our normal consumption, which tended towards wine. We drank 1-3 bottles of wine per week, so not planning to ever be drunk while on anchor (and we never drank underway), we ended up with 31 bottles of wine which would work out to about 1.5 bottles per week.  What we didn’t count on was that our tendency to drink more wine than beer at home wouldn’t continue while living aboard in a tropical climate.

It turned out that at the end of a hot sweaty day, the last thing either one of us wanted was a glass of red wine. We naturally gravitated towards a beer instead. We had all the water we needed, and kept refilling bottles to keep cold in our Dometic Cooler, but we continued to go through a surprising amount of beer. By mid-January, John announced that we were on our last 2 cases of beer! I think we ended up buying beer twice in The Bahamas. Once at $50 for 24, and once for $60 for 24 but I can’t say for sure.

In order to plan for the amount to buy for 5+ months, I thought about rotating meal plans based on chicken, beef, pork, fish, Italian, Mexican foods with side dishes or salads that we would typically eat in a week. I then added other grains, veggies and fruits as well as enough other items for breakfast, lunch and snacks.

We were fortunate that our catamaran had tons of extra space for storage so that’s part of why we took advantage of stocking up before we left. We bought way more of some things than we needed, but you can never have too many paper towels or Ziploc baggies, especially at Costco prices. Also if you’re partial to a particular tea or coffee brand, it’s best to buy before crossing. Meats, cheeses, crackers, chips or anything that is convenient in bulk, although it helps to have crackers & chips in smaller package sizes so they don’t go stale too quickly in the humidity.

Even though we visited some islands in the Bahamas that had no grocery stores, we were never short on yummy things to eat. Most small grocery stores on remote islands offered a few staples such as eggs, milk, onions, spices and some fruit if you knew when the mail boat arrived with supplies. Along the way, we also found some decent cheese at stores in Spanish Wells and Rock Sound and I learned that cheddar freezes quite well. I wrote about a few other storage tips in another article if you want to check it out.

In our previous post we were tracking our expenses as they ate into our rule-of-thumb for planning for an additional cost of 20% beyond the price of the boat. We were up to 17% before we considered provisions. It is debatable whether we should include provisioning expenses along the same lines, since we would have to eat regardless of where we were. However, since we like to be very conservative in our planning, we’ll include those cost within our tracking process here. With the addition of $2200, we’re now up to $80,700, which is 17.7% of our original purchase cost.

In the next post we’ll look at the proceeds from selling our boat.