Final provisioning was a bit of whirlwind, so much so that I barely remember it and it’s kind of a blur. Recall that we had done a fair amount of provisioning when we stayed in Paradise Village in January, so theoretically this last haul should be easy. We rented a car for just 24 hours, again from Paradise Village, and we were off to the races. We went to Costco, Mega, and Walmart, as well as a couple hardware stores. My approach was to provision for 3 months, long enough to get us to Papeete. Obviously, you can’t provision fresh items for 3 months, but we did load the fridge up with as much cheese and veggies as it would hold. A lot of the veggies don’t get stored in the fridge. Heartier ones like cucumbers, carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, apples, oranges, and others get stored in bins in our cabin and as the fridge slowly empties things get rotated in. The freezer was about as packed as it ever gets with all kinds of meat and about 12 packs of tortillas (we knew we were going to miss our tortillas after we left Mexico).
You might be surprised that the rest of the world does not store eggs in the fridge. Nope. I store 4 dozen eggs in open containers in our cabin, rotate them every other day or so, and they stay surprisingly fresh. I used to keep the lids on the lock ‘n’ lock storage containers and keep them in the cupboard, and I had a horrible time with mold growing on the outside of the eggshells, so I would have to wipe them clean everyday so the mold wouldn’t penetrate the shell. Then I realized that a little light and ventilation go a long way, and I never have any egg mold problems anymore.
We kept hearing and reading and hearing and reading that things are outrageously expensive in French Polynesia, especially soda and alcohol. So, we went a little crazy. We bought 8 cases of Pacifico, 2 cases of Pacifico Light, 10 bottles of Bacardi Anejo, 6 bottles of Captain Morgain, 4 cases of cokes and 4 cases of sparkling water. Supplementing all the alcohol we also have the odd bottle of Seagrams, Kahlua, Tequila, etc. We were very pleased with how prepared we were, but then came the challenge of where to stow it all. We came to a quick conclusion that we would have to turn one of the heads into a storage closet. Who needs 3 heads on their boat anyway, I mean really. We decided it would be Brenden’s simply because the back of the boat in Alex’s room already has a lot of weight in it (this is where our battery bank is). When we broke the news to Brenden, he quickly turned to Kyle and said, “you warned me this would happen!” Although, in all fairness I’m pretty sure Lady Carolina assumed we would give up one of our 3 heads much sooner than we did, I guess we just like fixing macerator problems.
Stowing everything is quite a chore and can take hours. Partly because there’s so little space and it’s like a puzzle getting everything to fit, and partly because I’m super anal (no, really?) and I keep an inventory log of how much we have of stuff and where it is stored. So, as I’m putting things away, I update the log as I go. This helps me when I need to reprovision (I don’t have to pull everything out and take inventory) but it is also very useful when I forget where I put something. I never have to go through the stress of not knowing where my Anejo is or how many bottles I have, oh the horror.
Once we turned the car back in and I slept for 12 hours straight I went into triage mode until we left. I kept track of what we used and every few days I’d hit a store (either in La Cruz or I would bus to Mega) and I would replenish what we used. This got really old, and by the time we left 11 days later, I was glad not to see another grocery store for a while.
Spoiler alert: Overall, our approach to provisioning was successful. We made it to Papeete easily without any major provisioning along the way. The only non-fresh item we ran out of was boxed milk, so I underestimated our milk usage, but I was able to restock that myself by backpack in Nuku Hiva. And contrary to popular belief, eggs are available EVERYWHERE in French Polynesia. We left La Cruz with 4 dozen eggs, and I never ran out. They are more expensive than in Mexico, but overall, they seem to be fresher too, so I don’t mind. There are really only 2 things I wish we had left Mexico with more of: 1) Apples. We ran out about a week into the passage, and since apples are a daily snack staple in our family, we really missed them. They store well and keep awhile, so we easily could have brought 2 or 3 times more than what we brought (we brought about 24). 2) Gasoline. We used our generator quite a bit on passage since the autopilot sucks a lot of juice and the sun doesn’t shine all the time.
Gresham Family Exodus 