John Ridgway Save the Albatross Voyage 2003-4

AIM: TO PREVENT THE NEEDLESS SLAUGHTER OF THE ALBATROSS

By Marie Christine Ridgway

From the beginning the task of victualling the boat has always fallen to me and I’m getting the hang of what I like. The job has ranged from producing food for up to 13 for our instructional cruises to St.Kilda and the Faeroes, to our 18 month family voyage to Antarctica via the Pacific, with lots of other voyages to remote places, in between. The most testing was providing food for John and Andy Briggs on their 203 day non-stop circumnavigation of the world, when nothing could be left behind.

My store cupboard on board is as well stocked as the one in my kitchen at Ardmore. Living 100 miles from the shops has instilled in me a siege mentality, so taking ingredients that will last means we can cook imaginatively when the spirit (not the sea) moves us. No celebration passes without a cake, we made mince pies at Christmas in the Caribbean, banana jam in the Pacific and chutney to use up fading vegetables.

Food plays such an important part in keeping up morale on board and it can be the highlight of the day. We’re lucky on English Rose to have lots of stowage space, but we don’t have the luxury of refrigeration. We have a gimballed three burner paraffin stove; the oven door has to be tied shut with a cord otherwise what’s cooking can spill onto the floor. Weights are secured underneath the cooker to counter-balance the weight of the pans on the burners. We use pressure cookers, as the twist-on lids help to keep the contents from spilling out in rough conditions; and if, in a stormy sea they are thrown off the cooker, you have a chance of saving the contents. I would prefer the convenience of a gas cooker, as I hate the smell of the priming meths and the extra time it takes, but paraffin is safer. Early in a voyage, struggling with sea-sickness, I’ve often had to make a dash for the lee rail!

I don’t much like convenience foods (dehydrated, boil-in-the-bag and canned, some cans are essential) you can tire of them quickly, but they are very handy when its rough and the crew has to have something hot. For me “real” food can’t be bettered, a plate of boiled potatoes with butter, beats some gluey goop overdosed with monosodium glutomate.

We try and bake bread most days: taking granary, strong white and other flours and different nuts and seeds to add interest. Vacuum-packed, dried yeast survives for months, as does the flour and it’s available anywhere in the world. Freshly baked pizza can be rustled up with store cupboard ingredients, and the smell of it cooking is tantalising. Porridge oats, rice and dried pulses are easy to store.

Dishes like mixed bean salad, with French dressing, raw onion and tinned tuna are good for lunch in hot weather; lentil soup is welcome in the cold; and crunchy, sprouting, mung beans are some of the treats which are easy to produce from the store cupboard when there is very little fresh food left.

Naturally, we take on as much fresh vegetables and fruit as possible, taking great care not to bruise the produce. Potatoes, onions and garlic, are essential and last well; white and red cabbage is good too. Squash and sweet potato go on forever. Limes and cooking apples also last for ages. Every few days we pick over the vegetables and fruit and take out and use anything that is going off. I chuck out very little, having experienced long periods at sea with practically nothing fresh left. Like the time stormy weather prevented us from going ashore, first at Pitcairn, then later at Easter Island: we ended up with ½ an onion per day between six of us, for the stormy 4 week voyage on to Valdivia, on the Chilean coast.

Its good to have extras on board, like capers, curry paste, spices, lemon juice, coconut and soya sauce, to make the most of what we might be lucky enough to get along the way. John has a big drum reel set on the stern and we have hauled in dorado, wahoo, and tuna; these fish always seem to come big, so we need plenty of variety in the cooking to make use of every last piece of these prime fish.

We spent all our remaining Chilean currency on vacuum-packed fresh chilled beef before leaving Ushuaia for the Antarctic; we stored the joints in the icy cold of the bilges. For weeks we feasted like kings but in the end we had a race to eat it all before we sailed out of the Antarctic Convergence into warmer waters. Only a few months previously, we had been trying to finish a whole stalk of ripe bananas before they melted, tied to the mizen mast, in the Pacific.

Eggs last for much longer if they’re kept in the dark. Vacuum-packed gammons and bacon are usually fine well after their sell-by date. Expensive, but really good are air-dried smoked bacon, hams and salamis which we keep suspended in a draft. Waxed cheeses like gouda and lumps of parmesan last well, and handy as an extra is tinned butter and cheese. We take dried milk powder, which we’ve used for years at Ardmore. Boxes of Orange Juice and Long-Life milk are very good but too bulky and heavy for long passages.

We take a lot of good Scottish oat cakes, and cream crackers a cure for queasiness. Dried fruit and nuts are a treat as are snacks like freshly made popcorn or chopped up poppadoms crisped in a little cooking oil, the ration list goes on and on.

Every item that is put on board is carefully noted in the stowage book, vital for easy finding on stormy days, and crossed off to show how much we have left.

One thing is for certain, we’ll not be going hungry on English Rose V1.

Marie Christine Ridgway
Ardmore, January 2003

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