Plan the fresh curve, not just the quantity
| Passage days | What you're eating | Planning note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 – 5 | Delicate fresh: salads, soft fruit, fish, fresh dairy | Buy at the last possible moment before departure. |
| 6 – 12 | Hardy fresh: root vegetables, citrus, cabbage, hard cheese, cured meat | This is the band most crossings under-plan. |
| 13 – 21 | Frozen, tinned, dry, long-life dairy, sprouted greens | Menu variety matters more than volume here. |
Stowage and shelf life
- Everything is decanted and re-packed: no cardboard aboard, cockroach risk starts in the box.
- Produce is graded on ripeness at packing so it comes good in sequence, not all at once.
- Freezer plan mapped meal by meal, so nothing gets excavated at 3am in a seaway.
- Labelled, indexed stow list handed over with the load, matched to the menu plan.
Contingency and water
We plan staples with roughly a 30% margin over the expected passage length — a slow crossing, a diversion or a watermaker fault should never become a food problem. Bottled water and long-life beverage volumes are sized to the same margin, independent of the watermaker.
Arrival resupply
The day you clear in is not the day to go shopping. We stage an arrival load so it meets you at Rodney Bay, Port St Charles, Falmouth or Port Louis — fresh, dairy, bread, produce and anything the crossing ate through — briefed before you left, confirmed by satellite en route as your ETA firms up.
Frequently asked
How much food do you need for an Atlantic crossing?
Plan the passage length plus about 30% margin on staples. For most Canaries-to-Caribbean crossings that means provisioning as if for three weeks, not two.
Where do most crossings finish?
St Lucia's Rodney Bay is the ARC finish. Barbados, Antigua and Grenada are the other common landfalls, and we stage arrival loads in all of them.
Can you brief the arrival load before we leave?
Yes, and it is the right way to do it. We firm the ETA with you by satellite en route and adjust the fresh items accordingly.
Do you provision the Canaries departure side?
We coordinate the loadout brief and the arrival side. Departure sourcing runs through our partner network in Las Palmas and Mindelo.