The Floating Gourmet: How To Cook On The Move

PROLOGUE

This book started out to be a cook book for cruisers demonstrating how people can cook like a gourmet chief with two burners on a sailboat, motor boat or an RV for that matter. However, after the book was completed, it became more of a traveling adventure with cooking. My husband and I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to sail the Transatlantic Circle for one and a half years. When we left on our journey, I purposely wanted to document as much as I could in the hopes of publishing a book or a video show.

One of my many jobs in life was a part time photographer, so I felt confident that I could take some great pictures, however, taking video was another story. It proved to be a real challenge and unfortunately at times, I moved the video camera around too fast when showing a 180 degree panorama view and quite a few scenes would make people dizzy to look at. There is a lot to learn about film making, that is why there are professionals to do the job. The good part is I have the clips and today's editing software can do magic.

This journey tells the story of how Tom and I left everything behind, including families, to discover new places such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, The Azores, crossing the Atlantic to Lisbon Portugal and then leisurely working our way down the southern coasts of Portugal and Spain. The journey continued to the island of Madeira and the Canary Islands to cross the Atlantic again to the Leeward Islands starting in Antigua and the beautiful Caribbean islands of the British Virgins and the U.S. Virgin islands. You will hear all the ups and downs of a couple traveling together on a 35 foot sailboat and discovering each other's strengths and weaknesses and how we both overcame our particular challenges. During this journey, I also wanted to document and create new regional recipes and ways to cook gourmet meals both on the boat while sailing and at anchor. Cooking on the move requires both creative skill in developing recipes and also a balancing act and lots of dexterity. It takes a sense of balance to cook while the boat is constantly moving back and forth at 4-6 knots. It also took a long time to plan this trip out and install many pieces of equipment to do the voyage and be safe at sea. It was all worthwhile as you read the story of a man fulfilling his life dream and a very anxious wife that had to find the courage to enjoy the adventure of a lifetime.

I tried to recreate the local dishes and come up with some new ideas using the traditional foods of that country. You will also read about living on a boat, the equipment needed and how to provision the boat for long journeys at sea. I hope that this book inspires both ideas in people to go out and travel and enjoy delicious gourmet meals along the way.

CHAPTER 1

Making the decision to cruise

Cruising on a sailboat means to most people a romantic and blissful journey sailing away across oceans with beautiful sunsets and pristine beaches, sipping cool drinks in the cockpit at anchorage. Well, all that is true, however, it is also a culmination of acquiring large amounts of money to be spent on equipment and repairs, time off of work if not retired, an extreme makeover of your boat to make it safe and ocean worthy, braving the weather given to you and a tenacity of strength and perseverance to keep from going stir crazy and not killing your crew on long passages. Passage making for a week or several weeks at sea requires a 24/7 watch, someone on duty in the cockpit to navigate around freighters, when spotted, and then basically just eating, sleeping and doing watch every 3 or 4 hours in a 24 hour time period. Boring, but boring is good at sea. The best ocean cruises are non-eventful but they don’t sell articles in boating magazines. They do publish how people survived a Gail Force 10 storm in crashing seas. An uneventful story, however, might start to convince the wife that it would be safe to go to sea after all. That is my take on it, now if you were to get Tom’s side of the story, it would quite different. From his perspective, he totally enjoyed the night watches and found the passage making part challenging and fulfilling as a sailor and a captain. Even though, at times, I paint a rather dismal picture from a women's perspective, everyone knows that there are females that enjoy the passage making parts of cruising and there are many professional women sailors and racers out there too. I happen to be a wimpy female who took the fear and turned it around to appreciate this Great Adventure that we were privileged to be given.

It was not difficult to figure out exactly when Tom started his dream of sailing his own boat across the oceans, it began with his first boat, a 22 foot Morgan called Ahoya. He was young, in his twenties, and although he just started his new professional career, he knew someday he would go cruising and not just for a day sail or a week's vacation. He never abandoned his dream of sailing the world and conquering the distant waters.

Many years have passed since then and now that he had his sailing wife the dream of cruising was beginning to surface as more of a reality. When Tom first mentioned the idea of going on a big cruise around the world, I took it rather lightly. What harm would it be to say sure dear, let's go when deep down I was convinced that he could not possibly pull it together. How was he going to get the money it takes to do it. How did he know what equipment was needed for an ocean voyage. What do we do with our house and two cats. How can we be gone so long without jobs. There is no way he could do the long list of things to do to make this happen.

As it turned out, I was wrong he did pull it together. It did take another year, but he studied the cruising books, talked to other ocean cruiser, took a course on weather and celestial navigation. He handled the whole trip with determination and confidence in his abilities. Even though he worked on the boat almost every day of the journey fixing, maintaining or replacing equipment, he also managed to enjoy himself tremendously along the way. Whereas, I just started to break out in a sweat from the mention of leaving to cruise as the days became closer and closer to our bon voyage. How could this be happening to me? My life was pretty good, I had a beautiful home, many friends and family and was considered the Princess of Clearview Subdivision living a dream life. Now, here I am, packing the house and putting all our belongings in storage, renting the house and in complete denial of the whole trip until we bought maps of all the different countries and long Atlantic ocean passages we would need. Vividly, I remember as we came out of the Map Store and it dawned on me, this is really going to happen, I am going to be sick. There was this feeling of light headedness and my stomach had a knot in it. He had his heart set on doing the cruise and I said I would do it, but he had to drag me out scraping the floors with my nails. No, not really, but it was very emotional. My thoughts kept whirling around, can I physically do the sailing and then the sadness of leaving everyone behind. Although I have been sailing for many years, I never imagined myself out in the middle of the ocean by myself at night in sometimes total darkness. As beautiful as it was watching the iridescent and luminous plankton float by me, I still saw and heard the waves circling me like a great white shark waiting to make the kill alone at night in the cockpit. Then I heard concert music that was not really playing. Honestly, I heard concert music, full symphonies and sometimes it was a Dave Mathews concert. The stories I heard about men going crazy at sea doing a single handed voyage all became too real to me. When there was a new moon, it became impossible to distinguish between the horizon of the waterline or the sky. My ability to determine if I was looking at a star or the top of a mast light from another sailboat or a freighter was maddening. Remember, when you are at watch, you are responsible for everyone’s safety on board while they are sleeping and trusting you to make the right decisions. Why am I out here? How did this happen that I agreed to such an incredulous undertaking? Well I did and it was too late now, we are out there sailing. As scary and frightening as the nights were, it was the complete opposite for the days. My two watches included seeing the sun rise every morning and watching the sunset every evening. Under those circumstances, it was not so bad. It wasn't long before I began to appreciate watching the start of a new day and end of the day as spectacular to say the least. It is so difficult to describe the magnitude of beauty that happens at those times, day after day, to humble us and know in the vastness of the sea how insignificant we humans are. Those were the times I will remember, tucked away and pulled out when we return to our normal lives again.

When I first started the cruise, my confidence in ocean sailing was zero, it just scared the hell out of me and we did not even leave the country yet. Yes, I knew how to sail, but it was only a day sail or an overnighter at the most with lots of people around me. The real matter was that I was home sick and missed my family and friends intensely. We gave up our cell phones and bought phone cards when we were in foreign countries. With an 8-10 hour difference in time, it was difficult to actually get people on the phone and sometimes, the phones did not work. We did have email on a regular basis, Skype when you were lucky to find a Wi-Fi, WEE FEE (as they say in Europe) that was working and that was it. Never the less, I learned to not only enjoy myself even though it did take a while, and started acting like a real sailor in many ways. By the time we arrived at the Azores, I really started to get into this world of cruising. How could someone not realize what an amazing and phenomenal adventure I was given, all I had to do was enjoy it. For example, I became one with Water World lovingly named by its appearance. Our self-steering wind autopilot was hard to describe. It was a tower of a stainless steel winged configuration and pulley lines that amazingly worked well to steer the boat without electricity. On the ocean, the electric pilot self-steering units could not keep up with the power needed to work on the ocean for weeks at a time. It was just one of many pieces of equipment used for our voyage.

After weeks and months went by, it became fun to map out our next stopping place and read up on the history and attraction of the village or town. The more we sailed and explored new places, the more confident I became with just about everything and as we started to get into a routine, it became more comfortable. On long passages, it takes about three days to adjust your circadian clock and feel good about the day to day duties and sleep patterns. Taking over some of the navigation responsibilities gave me even more confidence and fun too. My comfort zone, opposed to Tom's is planning everything out ahead and know exactly where we are going before we leave. Tom likes to look at a map and just go. He figures it out when he has to and it drove me crazy. However, there were many things I did that drove him crazy. It's a miracle we stayed together, thus the joys of a cruising couple.

Yes, I really was a sailing wife. I owned two sailboats by myself at the time we met in a Marina in Milwaukee WI. That is how we started dating, each living on our boats, bow to bow, as neighbors. (He really hates this story, but it's true.) We had so much fun sailing on weekends or after work, maybe across Lake Michigan and back for a week's vacation, that was what I called sailing, short and no overnighters, certainly not a passage at sea lasting one to three weeks at a time. In our case, we chose to live full time on our boat when we got married and in many ways it helped prepare us for the future long cruise. Most couples, I have heard, are more successful taking a long cruise if they can live on their boat for at least six months prior. We ended up living on our sailboat for about 10 years before buying our first house. You will know in a short time if you can live and still love each other in 350 square feet. The key to living on a sailboat as a couple is to remain polite to each other even when you don't feel like it. Excuse me, honey, I need to walk across the space you're in I would say. No problem dear he would say. Think about that, many people believe living on a sailboat is really cool and would love to do it. It takes great effort to provision the boat, cook and entertain guests especially in the winter in Milwaukee (main reason for moving south). It helped that we were in a marina at a dock, plugged in to 110 voltage, and had city water and propane gas for cooking. We went to work every day just like normal people did except we came home to a sailboat.

Stocking the refrigerator with fresh foods or how to keep a non-refrigerated cooler cold with blocks of ice at the bottom and cooking on only two burners. Never the less, I produced some amazing meals and could easily have eight people over for a sit down dinner at our table. Of course, once everyone was seated, you could not get out from the table until the meal was done, everyone was locked in place and feeling cozy.

After we were married for about three years, we decided to move to warmer weather in Charleston SC. We had already bought our beautiful boat Canard Azul a 35 foot Wauquiez, Pretorien. The name is supposed to be French meaning Blue Duck. It was given to us in a bar by a friend and found out much later that Azul is really Portuguese not French as we first thought for blue. Anyway, we thought it was a cool name. Our boat was perfect for ocean sailing, it was described as a cruiser/racer boat.

It had all the heavy rigging and taller mast for racing yet down below, it was elegantly furnished with hand finished teak paneling walls and better than average sinks and lighting. We decided to pay off our boat in seven years by living on it. Financially, although we were both working full time, we were barely making ends meet, the boat payments were higher than most mortgages. Little did I know that would change and there would be a significant event that made it all possible to do the big cruise.

We have done some smaller cruises, an 8 week North Channel trip, and the permanent move from Milwaukee to Charleston for 3 months. That cruise took us from Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. Down came the mast and