The Atlantic crossing is twenty-two days. Twelve people. Three meals a day. The provisioning morning in Las Palmas is the morning that the arithmetic of the offshore passage becomes physical: the produce and the protein and the dry stores and the beverages and the condiments and the fresh herbs and the specific items that Richard has on the list because twenty-two days of good cooking requires twenty-two days of considered ingredients, loaded onto Discovery in the order that the stowage plan determines, heaviest and least frequently needed at the bottom of the deep lockers, daily-use items in the accessible positions, the fresh produce in the ventilated storage that slows the ripening that the tropical ambient temperature accelerates.
The fresh vegetables last approximately ten days at sea with careful management, the items that ripen fastest used first, the items that keep longest reserved for the final week when the fresh options have diminished to the root vegetables and the cabbage and the citrus that the experienced offshore provisioner knows will still be good on day eighteen when everything else is gone.
The eggs, stored in the cool of the bilge-level lockers, last three weeks without refrigeration if they were fresh when bought, the air cell test at the waterline of the bucket tells whether an egg is still good without opening it. The bread is baked aboard from the dry flour and yeast that the stores carry. The trolling line supplements the protein when the pelagic fishing conditions allow it.
Day Fifteen
Day fifteen is the day the fresh provisions are finished. Not the day they were planned to be finished — the planning accounts for ten to twelve days of fresh and the remainder from the tinned and the frozen and the dry stores that the lockers hold.
Day fifteen is the day the passage cook demonstrates the specific skill of the offshore galley that the restaurant kitchen does not require: the cooking from what remains rather than from what was planned, the Portuguese sardine tins from the Canarian chandlery and the day-old rice from last night and the eggs that are still good and the spice drawer that has been accumulating aromatics across the Mediterranean legs and that makes the constraint into the specific creativity that the constraint produces in the person who knows how to work with it.
The twelve people who arrive in Barbados twenty-two days after Las Palmas have eaten well for the full crossing. Not uniformly, the day fifteen meal is the day fifteen meal and the day one meal is the day one meal and the trolling line meal is the best meal of the crossing on the day it happens.
But well, throughout, from the galley of the person who provisioned for the full twenty-two days in Las Palmas and who has been cooking from that provision every day since. The provisioning morning is the most underrated part of the Atlantic crossing preparation. Richard gives it the respect it deserves.
