chopstick goes for a sail
11-19-2018
, 06:24 AM
because I'm already tired of computing grams per serving for pasta/meat/veg..
Didn't stay in Rwanda long, mostly due to timing but also because Kigali is pretty boring. Incredibly clean, as everyone who goes there notices, but also not much going on. With the amount of trash everywhere in most major African cities, Kigali really stands out. They implemented their plastics ban a while ago, and they are pretty draconian about enforcing it. Whatever your opinion on that topic, it is inarguable that it works. If you think about most trash that you see in major less developed places, it's generally composed of plastic, including infinite plastic bags. Kigali has none of that. It was a nice change.
Despite the cleanliness, it was time to go. I packed up my sweet banana coins:
and headed off to the airport:
going thru the temp scanner:
which is usually just a person holding a temperature gun, but much nicer in Kigali, as seen above. Yellow Fever is still an issue in some parts of Rwanda, as are some other diseases, and they take the scans very seriously.
Decided to fly because I was headed to Addis Ababa next, and it was a huge distance that would have involved a lot of backtracking thru Uganda and Kenya by bus. Also, you can't get a visa on arrival for Ethiopia via land entry - they only grant them via air arrival, and only at AA.
My checked bag was searched but nothing taken:
and I got that sweet sticker which is now affixed to the cover of my laptop.
Ethiopia was an experience. Some pickpockets tried to mug me, I fed wild hyenas by mouth, had wild falcons snatch bits of meat out of my hand, got scammed by a forex guy for about $2, took a side trip to Djibouti for some diving, and ate my bodyweight in injera. More on all this later.
Didn't stay in Rwanda long, mostly due to timing but also because Kigali is pretty boring. Incredibly clean, as everyone who goes there notices, but also not much going on. With the amount of trash everywhere in most major African cities, Kigali really stands out. They implemented their plastics ban a while ago, and they are pretty draconian about enforcing it. Whatever your opinion on that topic, it is inarguable that it works. If you think about most trash that you see in major less developed places, it's generally composed of plastic, including infinite plastic bags. Kigali has none of that. It was a nice change.
Despite the cleanliness, it was time to go. I packed up my sweet banana coins:
and headed off to the airport:
going thru the temp scanner:
which is usually just a person holding a temperature gun, but much nicer in Kigali, as seen above. Yellow Fever is still an issue in some parts of Rwanda, as are some other diseases, and they take the scans very seriously.
Decided to fly because I was headed to Addis Ababa next, and it was a huge distance that would have involved a lot of backtracking thru Uganda and Kenya by bus. Also, you can't get a visa on arrival for Ethiopia via land entry - they only grant them via air arrival, and only at AA.
My checked bag was searched but nothing taken:
and I got that sweet sticker which is now affixed to the cover of my laptop.
Ethiopia was an experience. Some pickpockets tried to mug me, I fed wild hyenas by mouth, had wild falcons snatch bits of meat out of my hand, got scammed by a forex guy for about $2, took a side trip to Djibouti for some diving, and ate my bodyweight in injera. More on all this later.
11-20-2018
, 09:36 AM
mark - yeah it's on the way
Rexx - not sure if I had silverbeet or not, but I ate everything that I was offered or put in front of me.
golddog - going to have to delay a full response on that as provisioning is one of my favorite sailing topics and I have many thoughts on it. In a nutshell:
Eating strategy is same as poker: it depends.
Sometimes regular meals, sometimes everyone on their own. For longer passages, there is usually at least one regular shared meal tho - often a late lunch or early dinner.
In the case of foraging, meal composition depends on the people and the resources available. If you have access to a microwave (a luxury for sure due to its electrical demands) and ample storage space, then it is very easy to just do whatever you want, including individual serving meals. If not, it's much easier to default to shared pot meals like chili, etc.
Some of the variables that drive the strategy are: length of trip, # of people on boat, watch schedules, space on board, fridge/freezer availability & space if available, dietary restrictions, personal preferences, whether or not there is a dedicated cook, crew experience, etc
Here are a few examples:
When de cap, de cap bro, and I did the Hawaii -> Seattle run, it was 23 days. We had a stovetop and an oven. We were doing 2x 4hr shifts per person. We had a fair amount of space available for storage, and a decent size fridge/freezer. We all ate pretty much everything. No relevant dietary restrictions. We shared some of the duties but de cap bro did most of the cooking while de cap & I focused more on the cleanup. de cap did some killer muffins, tho. We all had multiple passages under our belts, so things went pretty smoothly.
When I crossed Ecuador -> French Polynesia with the Australians, it was also 23 days. Very similar to the Hawaii -> Seattle passage, except we had a strict rotation for whose turn it was to cook, clean, etc. The only baking was when I made bread, which everyone loved, but no one else wanted to put in the effort to do. We ate a lot of meat because Aussies love meat. We had a microwave but almost never used it. On another trip with the most of the same crew on the same boat, we bought something like 30 meat pies in New Caledonia for the passage to the east coast of Oz, and probably a third of my meals that week just involved nuking a chicken pie.
On a previous Atlantic crossing with stops in Bermuda & Azores, I was with two other USA#1ers on an enormous catamaran. We had tons of space, including tons of fridge & freezer space. Enormous solar panels and a huge battery bank let us use the microwave whenever we wanted. They enjoyed the finer things in life, so we were eating stuff like duck, truffles, etc.
Comparing the above to this coming passage, there will be a lot more constraints this time. There will be five of us, on a smaller catamaran. The cat was built as a racing cat, not a cruising cat. It was fitted out for charters. That means that storage space will be more limited than usual. It also means that there are two fairly small fridge/freezer combo units, but the freezers in each are little half shelf things with very little space. Very similar to this:
so I'm not counting on being able to freeze anything, and only refrigerate some stuff. We have one vegetarian and at least two mostly-vegetarians. Not sure about the last person. I'm an omnivore but I am fine going without meat for a few weeks.
The oven is also having issues, unable to go above 160C/320F (root cause unknown) and my friend has pretty much says he doesn't intend to fix it unless it's a easy/quick fix, so that pretty much rules out baking bread & muffins, sadly. No microwave, but the stovetop works fine.
What this means is that provisioning will be focused on non-refrigerated proteins like beans, lentils, quinoa. Fishing becomes more important for fresh protein because of the lack of cold storage, so I'll be running at least two lines. We'll have some cans of chicken but not many. Nuts (which I can't eat) will be more heavily provisioned than usual. I'll get something else for myself.
5 people x 20 days (estimate) x 3 meals/day = 300 meal units. Since we'll likely be doing at least dinner/lunches mostly together due to being well rested (5 people makes watches lots easier to handle), that means looking at about 40 group meals to plan out and try to maximize both nutrition and variety.
OK I'm cutting myself off here, otherwise I'll just go on and on forever.
In a nutshell, this passage is requiring more planning than usual due to these restrictions: no oven, mostly veg people, limited storage space, limited fridge space, zero freezer space.
So I'll be researching easy quinoa/seitan recipes and reminding myself how to properly cook lentils over the next couple of days.
Rexx - not sure if I had silverbeet or not, but I ate everything that I was offered or put in front of me.
golddog - going to have to delay a full response on that as provisioning is one of my favorite sailing topics and I have many thoughts on it. In a nutshell:
Eating strategy is same as poker: it depends.
Sometimes regular meals, sometimes everyone on their own. For longer passages, there is usually at least one regular shared meal tho - often a late lunch or early dinner.
In the case of foraging, meal composition depends on the people and the resources available. If you have access to a microwave (a luxury for sure due to its electrical demands) and ample storage space, then it is very easy to just do whatever you want, including individual serving meals. If not, it's much easier to default to shared pot meals like chili, etc.
Some of the variables that drive the strategy are: length of trip, # of people on boat, watch schedules, space on board, fridge/freezer availability & space if available, dietary restrictions, personal preferences, whether or not there is a dedicated cook, crew experience, etc
Here are a few examples:
When de cap, de cap bro, and I did the Hawaii -> Seattle run, it was 23 days. We had a stovetop and an oven. We were doing 2x 4hr shifts per person. We had a fair amount of space available for storage, and a decent size fridge/freezer. We all ate pretty much everything. No relevant dietary restrictions. We shared some of the duties but de cap bro did most of the cooking while de cap & I focused more on the cleanup. de cap did some killer muffins, tho. We all had multiple passages under our belts, so things went pretty smoothly.
When I crossed Ecuador -> French Polynesia with the Australians, it was also 23 days. Very similar to the Hawaii -> Seattle passage, except we had a strict rotation for whose turn it was to cook, clean, etc. The only baking was when I made bread, which everyone loved, but no one else wanted to put in the effort to do. We ate a lot of meat because Aussies love meat. We had a microwave but almost never used it. On another trip with the most of the same crew on the same boat, we bought something like 30 meat pies in New Caledonia for the passage to the east coast of Oz, and probably a third of my meals that week just involved nuking a chicken pie.
On a previous Atlantic crossing with stops in Bermuda & Azores, I was with two other USA#1ers on an enormous catamaran. We had tons of space, including tons of fridge & freezer space. Enormous solar panels and a huge battery bank let us use the microwave whenever we wanted. They enjoyed the finer things in life, so we were eating stuff like duck, truffles, etc.
Comparing the above to this coming passage, there will be a lot more constraints this time. There will be five of us, on a smaller catamaran. The cat was built as a racing cat, not a cruising cat. It was fitted out for charters. That means that storage space will be more limited than usual. It also means that there are two fairly small fridge/freezer combo units, but the freezers in each are little half shelf things with very little space. Very similar to this:
so I'm not counting on being able to freeze anything, and only refrigerate some stuff. We have one vegetarian and at least two mostly-vegetarians. Not sure about the last person. I'm an omnivore but I am fine going without meat for a few weeks.
The oven is also having issues, unable to go above 160C/320F (root cause unknown) and my friend has pretty much says he doesn't intend to fix it unless it's a easy/quick fix, so that pretty much rules out baking bread & muffins, sadly. No microwave, but the stovetop works fine.
What this means is that provisioning will be focused on non-refrigerated proteins like beans, lentils, quinoa. Fishing becomes more important for fresh protein because of the lack of cold storage, so I'll be running at least two lines. We'll have some cans of chicken but not many. Nuts (which I can't eat) will be more heavily provisioned than usual. I'll get something else for myself.
5 people x 20 days (estimate) x 3 meals/day = 300 meal units. Since we'll likely be doing at least dinner/lunches mostly together due to being well rested (5 people makes watches lots easier to handle), that means looking at about 40 group meals to plan out and try to maximize both nutrition and variety.
OK I'm cutting myself off here, otherwise I'll just go on and on forever.
In a nutshell, this passage is requiring more planning than usual due to these restrictions: no oven, mostly veg people, limited storage space, limited fridge space, zero freezer space.
So I'll be researching easy quinoa/seitan recipes and reminding myself how to properly cook lentils over the next couple of days.
11-22-2018
, 06:49 AM
Probably no more catch-up updates until I'm back in USA#1. Here's a realtime update as of today from the Canary Islands.
Met up with the rest of the crew last night for dinner on the boat. It will be the USA#1 owner/captain, who I've sailed with before a few times in the Carib about 5 years ago (he's the one I caught the shark with as mentioned way back in the start of this thread), a French woman with some good sailing experience who definitely seems to know what she's doing, a Norwegian woman with less experience but a effervescent attitude, a Finnish/Russian woman who has been sailing with the captain the last few months, and yours truly. And the dog, who has lived almost his whole life on the boat.
This will be the first majority-women crewed vessel (unless you count the dog, then we're an even split) I've sailed on. My friend prefers sailing with women for various reasons, #1 being to prevent any kind of alpha dog testosterone-fueled conflicts. Since we've sailed together before, he makes an exception for me as I'm a known good sailor that won't create problems.
I'll be the most experienced person (by miles & passages) on the boat by a decent margin, but my friend lives on his boat and has for the last five years, so he's thoroughly salty.
Doesn't look like we're going to get the oven fixed, so sadly no bread/muffins during the passage. Guess I'll load up on some preserved waffles or similar. Pretty sad about this to be honest, de cap converted me to the Church of Muffins on our Hawaii -> Seattle run.
We went thru the provisioning list line by line last night and made some minor changes but everyone was happy with it for the most part. I got loled at a few times with some of the quantities at first, but each time, we stopped and did the math and the numbers we came up with were almost always exactly what I had already defaulted to, so eventually they just started trusting my numbers. At the end, they all complimented me on how organized and efficient the spreadsheet was, and its accuracy with estimates.
I think we're a little light on sauces and I wasn't able to convince them about the perishability of fruit/veg so we may have some issues there, but that was not a battle I felt like fighting, and I made sure to get enough canned f/v. Once I explained the water requirements for making seitan, the enthusiasm for that damped quite a bit.
I'm a little concerned about water in general as we are taking what I consider the bare minimum (2L/person/day) but we do have a watermaker and will also bring some juice and a little soda. I'm fine drinking rainwater if it comes to that.
As for staple foods that will comprise the bulk of the meals, here's an image from the provisioning spreadsheet I made:
so as you can see, zero meats. Probably for the best, considering the tiny size of the available cold storage. I will be getting some canned chicken and dried sausages tho. My guess is that they will want some as well when they see me eating it, so I kinda overprovisioned for those two. The French woman is definitely onboard with the dried sausages so I asked her to be in charge of that selection as well as the cheeses - how's that for a stereotype?
Hopefully we'll catch a few fish along the way and everyone is happy to eat those. I picked up a decent filleting knife here as well as some extra treble hooks and my friend still has some of the lures I brought last time including about 8 weighted squid skirts. I figure we'll lose 4-6 of those so 8 should be enough.
We plan to go to the store today and load up. We'll see how that goes. I suggested taking a taxi back if the store won't deliver to the marina - usually they will but they might not be available due to black Friday & the massive # of boats here. We may end up hiring a car instead.
Departure schedule is a little wonky.
Target departure is tomorrow but that seems unlikely to me due to the amount of stuff we have remaining. Most of the boats here will depart on Sunday, which means they will provision fruit/veg on Saturday, so we want to avoid leaving on Sunday and/or provisioning fruit/veg on Saturday as the markets will be empty, hence attempting regular provisions today and fruit/veg tomorrow morning for an afternoon departure tomorrow.
If that schedule slips, probably looking at either a Saturday or Monday departure, but those are complicated by Black Friday (yes, it's a thing over here) sales and most stuff being closed on Sundays. I wouldn't mind leaving on Monday if the weather holds, we have a fair number of remaining tasks that I just don't see us getting done in the next 36 hours.
We don't have a target destination yet, just going to kind of wing it and end up where we end up somewhere in the Caribbean. I'm guessing Martinique or somewhere near there, but we'll see. Probably about 18-20 days passage depending on wind, how weighed down we are, and how good a job we do cleaning the hull.
Sorry not sorry for the wall of text, I know at least a couple of you find this stuff interesting. I'll take lots of photos on the passage.
Met up with the rest of the crew last night for dinner on the boat. It will be the USA#1 owner/captain, who I've sailed with before a few times in the Carib about 5 years ago (he's the one I caught the shark with as mentioned way back in the start of this thread), a French woman with some good sailing experience who definitely seems to know what she's doing, a Norwegian woman with less experience but a effervescent attitude, a Finnish/Russian woman who has been sailing with the captain the last few months, and yours truly. And the dog, who has lived almost his whole life on the boat.
This will be the first majority-women crewed vessel (unless you count the dog, then we're an even split) I've sailed on. My friend prefers sailing with women for various reasons, #1 being to prevent any kind of alpha dog testosterone-fueled conflicts. Since we've sailed together before, he makes an exception for me as I'm a known good sailor that won't create problems.
I'll be the most experienced person (by miles & passages) on the boat by a decent margin, but my friend lives on his boat and has for the last five years, so he's thoroughly salty.
Doesn't look like we're going to get the oven fixed, so sadly no bread/muffins during the passage. Guess I'll load up on some preserved waffles or similar. Pretty sad about this to be honest, de cap converted me to the Church of Muffins on our Hawaii -> Seattle run.
We went thru the provisioning list line by line last night and made some minor changes but everyone was happy with it for the most part. I got loled at a few times with some of the quantities at first, but each time, we stopped and did the math and the numbers we came up with were almost always exactly what I had already defaulted to, so eventually they just started trusting my numbers. At the end, they all complimented me on how organized and efficient the spreadsheet was, and its accuracy with estimates.
I think we're a little light on sauces and I wasn't able to convince them about the perishability of fruit/veg so we may have some issues there, but that was not a battle I felt like fighting, and I made sure to get enough canned f/v. Once I explained the water requirements for making seitan, the enthusiasm for that damped quite a bit.
I'm a little concerned about water in general as we are taking what I consider the bare minimum (2L/person/day) but we do have a watermaker and will also bring some juice and a little soda. I'm fine drinking rainwater if it comes to that.
As for staple foods that will comprise the bulk of the meals, here's an image from the provisioning spreadsheet I made:
so as you can see, zero meats. Probably for the best, considering the tiny size of the available cold storage. I will be getting some canned chicken and dried sausages tho. My guess is that they will want some as well when they see me eating it, so I kinda overprovisioned for those two. The French woman is definitely onboard with the dried sausages so I asked her to be in charge of that selection as well as the cheeses - how's that for a stereotype?
Hopefully we'll catch a few fish along the way and everyone is happy to eat those. I picked up a decent filleting knife here as well as some extra treble hooks and my friend still has some of the lures I brought last time including about 8 weighted squid skirts. I figure we'll lose 4-6 of those so 8 should be enough.
We plan to go to the store today and load up. We'll see how that goes. I suggested taking a taxi back if the store won't deliver to the marina - usually they will but they might not be available due to black Friday & the massive # of boats here. We may end up hiring a car instead.
Departure schedule is a little wonky.
Target departure is tomorrow but that seems unlikely to me due to the amount of stuff we have remaining. Most of the boats here will depart on Sunday, which means they will provision fruit/veg on Saturday, so we want to avoid leaving on Sunday and/or provisioning fruit/veg on Saturday as the markets will be empty, hence attempting regular provisions today and fruit/veg tomorrow morning for an afternoon departure tomorrow.
If that schedule slips, probably looking at either a Saturday or Monday departure, but those are complicated by Black Friday (yes, it's a thing over here) sales and most stuff being closed on Sundays. I wouldn't mind leaving on Monday if the weather holds, we have a fair number of remaining tasks that I just don't see us getting done in the next 36 hours.
We don't have a target destination yet, just going to kind of wing it and end up where we end up somewhere in the Caribbean. I'm guessing Martinique or somewhere near there, but we'll see. Probably about 18-20 days passage depending on wind, how weighed down we are, and how good a job we do cleaning the hull.
Sorry not sorry for the wall of text, I know at least a couple of you find this stuff interesting. I'll take lots of photos on the passage.
11-27-2018
, 09:45 AM
11-27-2018
, 06:59 PM
Safe travels! ⛵️ 
