Marsali Taylor sails an Offshore 8M, Karima S. She’s a
dinghy instructor and author of The Shetland Sailing
Mysteries starring liveaboard sleuth, Cass Lynch.
Living with the seaMarsali Taylor
B
oat provisioning is a fi ne art. I
don’t mean those occasions
when you have friends aboard
for lunch and ‘do catering’:
bannocks and cold meat from
the shop, home-baked chocolate cake,
three sorts of fruit and fresh milk in a
container for tea or coffee afterwards.
Provisioning means stores aboard, so
that on a bonny summer morning you can
just go, without having to waste sailing
time ransacking the bread bin and fridge
for a picnic.
A boat lunch needs to be designed for
windier days. I have to be able to fetch it
quickly from below as I’m hove-to and
fore-reaching rapidly towards shore or
mussel rafts. I may need to eat it with one
hand on the tiller. Food which can survive
sliding onto the cockpit fl oor as we tilt is a
bonus – sometimes lunchtime arrives
while you’re going upwind, perfectly
happily, but at an acute angle from the
point of view of a biscuit set on the cockpit
seat. Nairn’s oatcakes are good, as the
box contains grabbable sealed packs of
six. The box of the Co-op’s peppercrackers, once opened, fi ts neatly into one
of those plastic screw-lid containers that
peaches come in. To go with them, those
packets of cheese slices that have
suspiciously long ‘best before’ dates keep
well if they’re stored in a cool, below-
waterline locker. They can get pretty
exotic too – Emmental, anyone, or
smoked Bavarian?Biscuits are easy; all those varieties of
nut bars keep well, though the special sort
with a chocolate layer on the base need to
join the dairy products in the cool.
Fruit: well, apples survive the cool locker
as well, though by the end of a season
they’ve acquired that boat fl avour, a
mixture of damp and diesel, and are best
offered to a friendly Shetland pony.
Cherries are worth bringing from home, so
long as you watch out for that one that
escapes from the packet and has to be
retrieved before it blocks a cockpit drain.
Drink. A vexed question. Teabags andcoffee keep not too badly on board, but
mean remembering to fi ll that small
container with milk and take it boatwards
with you – one boat I know has got round
this with those little plastic things you get
on planes. Sugar has a tendency to go
damp, even in a tightly-screwed jar. My
favourite boat tipple is drinking chocolate,
brown or preferably white. It’s far too
sweet for land use, but hits the spot nicely
on a cold day out at sea.
But suppose you’re having fun, and
want to stay out until you drift home on the
last of the wind as the sun sets? That
means an actual meal.
I have, of course, eaten wonderful
dinners on board boats: delicious stews
made in pressure cookers, grilled
mackerel that came out of the sea only ten
minutes ago, freshly-baked apple
turnovers and ginger biscuits, and that
voyage on the tall ship Sorlandet when
they had a Danish chef, and I came home
several pounds heavier in spite of the
mast-climbing exercise.
Normal boat meals on occasional-use
boats tend to be simpler. Tins, for
example, have the dual advantage of a
long sell-by date and heating up quickly
over a single ring, especially if you
accompany them with rice that’s been put
in a wide-neck fl ask with boiling water just
before you set out (I haven’t tried this with
pasta, which cooks more quickly than
rice, but tends to fi ll your cabin with
steam). I’m partial to chunky chicken in
white sauce, meatballs or chilli con carne.
I don’t have an oven, but on boats that do,
Fray Bentos pies are considered gourmet
catering, followed by tinned custard and
the sort of peaches that come in a handy
plastic screw-lid tub.
Stores have to be stored, of course.
Aboard my Karima tins go in the under-
settee locker which has damp tendenciesdue to a leak from the starboard window
on rainy days when the wind’s from the
west. They stand in an ice-cream tub, to
save rust rings on the white paint
(discussions up at the boating club have
generally concluded that rust isn’t
dangerous to the food, per se, although
you might consider condemning a tin
where the rust has gone right through to
the food). This is where the plastic tubs
score again, though woman cannot live
on peaches alone.
But while there are tins in the lockers,
she won’t starve either.Handy stores that’ll
keep well on a boat‘Those cheese slices with suspiciously long “best
before” dates keep well in a cool locker’Food afl oat
A liveaboard larder can make or break a day
sail when you’re in a hurry to get on the water
Marsali^
Tayl
or