[Alex W]

My wife and I are going to spend a week on our 22' windrose in September. Any suggestions on how to pack a week's worth of food on a small boat would be VERY useful!

First question is: do you really need a week's worth of food? Are there any grocery stores along your route? If so bring along dry goods, but purchase meat, dairy, and produce along the way. If your trip is a week long you'll need to restock on ice at least once. I add about 8 lbs of ice to our cooler every other day, primarily using block ice if possible. This leaves plenty of reserve and we can go for 4 days without adding ice if necessary.

Repacking food into ziplock-style bags saves a lot of room. This is also essential to keep stuff mostly dry in the cooler, otherwise it will go swimming and get wet. Bags also save a lot of room on anything in a cardboard box, like cereal, rice (boxed risotto kits make a nice side), pasta, etc.

Figure out portions ahead of time for some meals, it makes them faster to make and takes less space. For instance we like to make pancakes about once a week while cruising, and just pour a day's worth of pancake ingredients into a bag and store that instead of bringing along the whole box.

I keep a couple of days of freeze dried camping food on the boat as a backup just in case we go longer than expected between stops.

Produce (and other food) stores nicely in small gear hammocks that take up otherwise unused space along the gunwales of the cabin.

Enjoy the trip! I just came back from a 16 day trip and I already miss it.

 

[Alex W]

I find that I snack through lunch, since that is a lot easier to do while sailing. So I bring along more snack foods while sailing (hummus and carrots, chips and salsa, fruit, yogurt) and less lunch food.

We try not to make enough to have leftovers, but do sometimes stick leftovers in the cooler and eat them later.

For my last trip my wife made a large batch of nice potato salad that we kept in the cooler and could use as a side or quick snack. That was pretty handy.

If you are on a fresh water lake that is clean I'd just bring a backpacking water filter. The gravity filters that MSR and Platypus make are very easy to use and work great. If the lake is polluted from agricultural runoff then I wouldn't filter and drink the water.

If you can get ice every day you can probably source water as well. We use about 5-8 gallons of fresh water per day (total for 2 adults) when we aren't being too frugal, 2-3 when we are being careful. We do drink the water out of our fresh water system, while some other friends keep a separate bottled water supply for drinking water.

I'm vegetarian and the selection of freeze dried backpacking food for vegetarians is small but pretty good. The best ones are either pasta based (which makes them overpriced but easy to make) or make good fillings for tortillas. Mixing them in a tortilla with some fresh produce (or probably meat) and turning it into a burrito of sorts can make them pretty tasty.