The last roll

You know how I said that we went on a major Costco trip before we left to see how well we could provision for a longer period of time? Well, the good news is that we have learned a lot about how much we can eat and how much we need to buy. The other good news is that for the most part I correctly estimated our ratios – how much of each item we eat in proportion to other items. The bad news is that we learned both of these lessons by running out of everything at the same time.

We are on our last bottle of wine and our last roll of toilet paper. It is an emergency* situation on SV Estrellita 5.10b.

We have no produce except picked berries, no milk (not even powdered, long life or canned), no fresh meat except what Carol catches. At least we still have chocolate and thanks to our going away party we still have rum (thanks George!). I honestly thought I bought 4-6 months of cheese, bacon, canned chicken, etc. I bought about 2 months worth of all of that. Our new theory is for now we will decide how much we think we should buy of something and TRIPLE that amount.

Besides underestimating what we eat, we seriously overestimated the amount of food we would find on the W Coast given our sailing plan of not going deep into most inlets. The bigger towns appear to be deeper inside the inlets and with them, the grocery stores with such extravagant items such as “fruit” and “vegetables” and “bread”.  Because we are moving slowly down the coast we are exacerbating the problem. Many boats would not have so much time between Port Hardy and Tofino.

We are going to Tofino tomorrow. We heard a rumor that the co-op grocery will deliver to the docks for a buck. If so, we plan to abuse that privilege. Carol and I reorganized our interior storage (we actually still had a few lockers that are 1/2 empty – crazy, huh?) and we now have room for even more food. This might actually help our fore-aft trim issues (more on that later).

*Obviously not really an emergency. We could survive on pasta, rice and bread (that we bake) alone for another month.