How to Provision a Sailboat for Two Weeks: Why the Sausages Worked but the Wine Didn’t

I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.

The homemade cured sausages that survived Lucky and Diggity were a hit. The bottle of red wine that had a cork instead of a cap was a bust. Here is a list of the provisions that Julia and I took on our 2-week long trip aboard our sailboat Grit to study the wild ponies of Shackleford Banks. Here’s what worked, what didn’t and why every sailboat should carry a corkscrew.

The Setup

My wife Julia and I have just spent two weeks anchored off Shackleford Banks observing the wild ponies that call the uninhabited island home. Grit, our 1992 Nimble 24 sailboat, was our floating island for the duration which meant we had to be self-contained. No runs to the grocery store every other day for bread and milk, no plugging into marina shore power to charge the batteries and no dude on a moped delivering Thai curry basil to our hatch.

While we had some hellacious adventures, like getting clocked by a 40-knot gale that sprang up out of nowhere, getting our anchor snagged on what I imagined was Davy Jones’ Locker and getting sideswiped by a 250-hp skiff, provisioning for our trip and preparing three delicious square meals a day was a pleasure, not a hardship.

Homemade and Gifted Provisions

• Baggie homemade granola
• Baggie spicy candied pecans
• 6 homemade chocolate chip cookies in a paper bag
• 12 gallons water from our spring
• 9 homemade sausages
• 10 heads home-grown garlic

The homemade granola, candied pecans and chocolate chip cookies were a gift from our friends Laura Turgeon and Gil Fontes in Oriental, North Carolina, where we started our trip aboard Grit. Call it the best of barter magic. Three heads of garlic turn into homemade granola, candied pecans and cookies. We had breakfast foods coming at us from two directions, 4 pounds of store-bought muesli as ballast and Gil and Laura’s as the good stuff.

Plus, the paper bag the chocolate chip cookies came in was re-used for two weeks to store the sandwiches that Julia prepared on board and we enjoyed for lunch in the sand dunes as we observed the wild ponies.

More than half the water that we brought on our trip came from our spring. Luckily, no spring lizards or crayfish have come shooting into our drinking glasses as has happened before — yet.

I made the homemade sausage — 28 sausages in 28 random lengths from finger to foot-long — one manic January night. I hung them from the stairs, Julia eyed them with suspicion and Lucky and Diggity, our rescue border collies, eyed them with delight. The experiment was my first time making sausage and turned out great. We ate all but nine of these sausages, which we brought on our trip. They worked out amazingly well as snacks and also on pasta and in our sandwiches. Thanks to them, we never missed having raw meat on board, which was a non-starter given that we don’t have or want refrigeration aboard Grit. It just consumes too much power.

The garlic came from our garden and provided continuity in our cooking. At home, I cook a clove of garlic most every evening as I figure out what comes next, and that eased my transition from the small kitchen in our cabin to our tiny galley aboard Grit, where I do much of the food prep in my lap.

The biggest joy of all this homemade food was that it made us feel like we still had a connection to some of the things that bring us the most joy at home — cooking meals slowly on our wood stove and two-burner camp stove that serves as our main stove.

Store-bought Provisions

Julia and I live in a 500-square-foot cabin in western North Carolina. Two days before we hitched Grit to our pickup and towed her to Oriental to begin our trip, Julia drove to Food Lion and bought provisions. We had discussed what we wanted to eat and she made up the rest off the top of her head — no written list. Then we hauled Grit to Oriental and Julia made another trip to the grocery store, this time a Piggly Wiggly, to buy the last-minute items we needed, like cold IPA.

• 2 packs pasta
• 1 pound-jar pearl couscous
• 1 pound-jar regular couscous
• 1 can field peas
• 1 can smoked oysters
• 2 cans asparagus
• 1 can chopped collards
• 1 pouch precooked chickpeas
• 2 pouches precooked lentils
• 3 pouches precooked vegetarian Indian: saag paneer, chana masala, something hot as hell
• 2 quinoa tuna packets
• 1 jar tuna fillets in lemon and oil
• 2 2-pound bags Grandy Organics Swiss Style Muesli
• 2 boxes Pop-Tarts
• 2 salted caramel chocolate bars
• 1 Dubai chocolate bar (made in New Jersey)
• 2 packs (4.8 oz) shelled pistachios
• 1 pack (4 oz) shelled macadamias
• 1 pound mixed fruit and nuts (dried cherries, walnuts and apricots)
• 2 boxes Bedtime tea
• 1 1-pound bag coffee
• 1 2-pound bag decaf coffee
• 3 loaves bread
• 1 2-pound jar honey
• 2 16-oz bags dried pasta
• 1 bag flour tortillas
• 2 1-lb blocks cheddar cheese
• 1 1-lb block smoky gouda cheese
• 1 1-lb block stinky cheese
• 1 bag carrots
• 1 bag apples
• 1 red cabbage
• 6 Kind bars
• 5 Clif bars (peanut butter)
• 6 eggs
• 1 box Comfort and Joy tea
• 2 boxes Bedtime tea
• 1 box Tetley tea
• 1 package Stockman’s oat cakes (8 crackers)
• 1 box Effie’s Oat Crackers
• 1 box Effie’s Almond crackers
• 1 box walnut crackers
• 1 jar organic crunchy peanut butter
• 1 jar mayonnaise
• 1 jar (6 oz) tomato basil pesto
• 1 package dehydrated chicken alfredo
• 1 six-pack IPA
• 1 six-pack Pernicious Hazy IPA
• 1 bottle moscato
• Flask of Laphroaig whisky
• Total cost (est): $400 (2026 $)

Seasonings

• Salt
• Pepper
• Curry powder

Turning 15 Grocery Bags Into Ship Shape

Grit is 26 feet long on deck and displaces 2,600 pounds. That’s modest given that the average new cruising sailboat measures 40 to 45 feet and displaces roughly 20,000 pounds.

She has a traditional layout for a centerboard vessel of her size — galley to port, nav station to starboard, drop leaf in the middle of the cabin that sits on top of the centerboard case.

Here is a hand-drawn sketch of her layout.

I thought her small size would make storing our provisions a challenge but it turned out I shouldn’t have worried.

The day before we launched, we stored all the food we’d bought. My guiding principle was that the provisions had to be close to where I cook. Grit‘s galley — sink, cook stove, plate and skillet storage — is on the port (left) side. The mugs and seasonings are under the main companionway. When I cook, I sit on the port settee and do my thing while Julia sits on the starboard settee and does the meal prep — chopping garlic, shredding carrots, cutting apples. That means all the food has to be within reach, not buried where there’s lots of space — like Grit‘s forepeak — which is out of reach. The forepeak was reserved for sleeping bags, tent, camera gear and life jackets — things we needed to access but not while cooking.

Most of the food was stored in compartments under Grit‘s settees. To keep the food from rolling around (a bottle of red wine rolling back and forth out of reach in a rolly anchorage is a sure sleep-destroyer), I packed it in small boxes we’d collected the week before we left. The small boxes were the best because they allowed us to group foods that go together — pasta and pasta sauce in one box, Kind bars and granola in another.

Ten boxes got the job done. They held up great. None of them were labeled or melted in the humidity or got ripped apart looking for a jar of pasta that was hiding in the snack box.

My proudest packing achievement? Stowing all our food aboard Grit and still having one storage compartment completely empty and another one only half full.

It turns out you don’t need a 40-foot boat that displaces 20,000 pounds to swallow up half a month’s worth of provisions for two people. Grit, at one-eighth the size of a new cruising boat, did it just fine.

The Piggly Wiggly Garbage Bag Hack

Julia and I used all our Food Lion and Piggly Wiggly bags for garbage bags. I’d brought along a small wastebasket perfectly sized for grocery bags and, as we emptied our cans of asparagus and ate our Pop-Tarts and wiped up spills with paper towels, we put the trash in the empty bags. In two weeks, we filled three plastic shopping bags with garbage — a lot less than the wheelie bin we fill in the same amount of time at home. Yes, we use shopping bags for garbage bags at home, too.

What the Day’s Meals Looked Like

Cooking meals was easy. A sample of the three meals we ate per day (per person):

• Breakfast: Coffee (half caffeinated, half decaf) and cooked Swiss Style Muesli
• Lunch: Sandwich (wheat bread, cheddar, mayo, salt and pepper), water, half an apple or a snack bar (Clif or Kind bar)
• Dinner: Couscous with pre-cooked lentils, red cabbage and carrot salad dressed with olive oil, salt, pepper, mayo and curry dressing, one square of chocolate the size of a large Forever stamp

Breakfast was always the same with the occasional blueberry Pop-Tart thrown in to prevent scurvy. Dinner rotated between couscous, pasta and the Indian pouches depending on what we felt like and how late we got in from observing wild ponies.

Julia and I made time at the end of most days ashore to watch the sun set over Shackleford Banks. Our drink of choice was one 12-oz beer split between us. I poured half the beer into a juice jar until it reached the 6-oz mark. Julia drank from the can. Then we watched the sun settle over the dark horizon.

Where to Put the Water

We figured the two of us would need 30 gallons of water for two weeks on Shackleford Banks.

One of the biggest challenges with storing water on a boat is that it needs to balance out properly. If you store too much water toward the front of the boat, the bow gets bow-heavy. That’s not good because the extra weight doesn’t allow the bow to rise to the seas. Same goes for the stern. Too much aft and the stern squats, which is dangerous in following seas.

The extra weight of water also has to balance out side to side. Water is heavy. If you store 30 gallons, which weighs 240 pounds, all on one side, the boat will lean over to that side.

In the end, we came up with this arrangement.

• 15 gallons (est) fresh water in Grit‘s water tanks / port side under the cockpit
• 4 2.5-gallon containers water / starboard side under the settee
• 3 1-gallon containers water / port side under the sink
• 2 6-gallon containers water from our spring / starboard side in cockpit locker

As the water was used, we moved the containers around to keep Grit trimmed fore and aft as well as side to side.

Thirty gallons of water was plenty for the two of us. We did discover one thing we hadn’t planned on. The water that came out of Grit‘s tank tasted funky, like it came out of a hose that had been lying in the hot sun. So we used that water for washing dishes and splash baths. Yes, once a week, I heated up a gallon of hose-tasting water, poured it into the ship’s bucket (which serves double duty as my mule Polly’s grain bucket) and we lathered up and rinsed off in Grit‘s cockpit.

At the end of our trip, we still had one 6-gallon container full of water left and an undetermined amount of hose-tasting water left in the tank. The plan is to pour that out as soon as I get home.

Next time, instead of buying 2.5-gallon containers at the grocery store, I’d buy one-gallon jugs. We refilled the one-gallon jugs from our 6-gallon plastic containers, put the caps back on and stored them under the galley. We couldn’t refill the 2.5-gallon containers because you can’t put the tops back on them after you’ve taken them off. That means, in addition to not being able to reuse them, you have numerous empty 2.5-gallon water containers rolling around the boat after about a week.

Consumables

• 4 cans propane
• 1 roll paper towels
• 2 rolls toilet paper

We went through paper towels and toilet paper with consideration — somewhere between happy abandon and washing and drying between use. I’m not a fan of paper towels, for waste reasons, and prefer to wipe up spills with cloth towels and rags. On this trip, I simply forgot to bring them.

What We Didn’t Eat

As a credit to Julia’s initial provisioning, we didn’t end up with too many leftover provisions.

• 1 pack pre-cooked chickpeas
• 1 packet wild-caught tuna
• 1 large can albacore tuna in water
• 1 small can chunk tuna in water
• 1 can mackerel fillets in olive oil
• 1 can King Oscar Sardines in lemon
• 1 can wild-caught sardines in olive oil
• 1 can wild-caught sardines Mediterranean style
• 1 bag dried split peas
• 1 16-oz jar pasta sauce
• 1 jar asparagus
• 1 box Bisquick biscuit mix
• 4 Kind bars
• 6 Clif bars (chocolate macadamia)
• 6 Kind bars (dark chocolate sea salt)
• 1 pack ramen noodles
• 1 box Comfort and Joy tea
• 6 eggs
• 2 packages Stockman’s oat cakes (8 crackers each)
• 1 bottle red wine

That sounds like a lot of food but actually, you could fit it into a medium-size cardboard box. The biggest food group that we didn’t finish was canned fish. The main reason we didn’t finish all our tinned fish was because we didn’t have enough bread or a toaster oven. At home, open-face toasted sardine sandwiches are a staple. On Shackleford Banks, lacking both a toaster oven and endless loaves of bread, cold scaly sardines out of a can lost their shine. Maybe we should have invited a seagull over for lunch.

There were no leftover sausages, homemade granola, candied pecans or chocolate chip cookies.

The Bisquick mix went uneaten because mornings, we wanted to get out and observe the ponies as quickly as possible, so cooked granola won that race. Plus, making pancakes is messy. Lacking our border collies Lucky and Diggity to lick the batter bowl clean, we didn’t want to deal with the extra cleanup.

The great news is that now I’ll be semi-provisioned for the next three weeks. Julia is heading home soon and I’ll head out to explore the Outer Banks with Grit until the end of the month.

What We Didn’t Bring

We didn’t bring anything that required refrigeration. That means no uncooked meats like steaks, burgers, sausages or bacon, and no fresh milk or yogurt for our granola or coffee.

The thought of living for two weeks without refrigeration makes people think of hurricane survivors after the power goes out. Fact is, people have lived far longer without refrigeration than with it. Some of the foods that people assume need refrigeration don’t. Like eggs. We kept a dozen in a cooler without ice for two weeks and they didn’t hatch or go bad.

In fact, we didn’t give the lack of refrigeration a first, let alone second, thought. We didn’t miss raw meat or milk. We got used to drinking beer at room — er, boat — temperature. The funny thing is that, in the case of the beer, we knew we had more days than beer, so we were so happy to split a beer between us some evenings (no, we rarely got a whole beer each) that it never crossed our minds that it wasn’t cold.

How We Felt on This Diet

Julia and I felt great eating what we ate and felt like we got everything we needed from this diet. At least for two weeks. The biggest adjustment was not eating as many fresh greens as we’re used to at home, where we get fresh lettuce and salad from our garden and watercress from the brook that runs by our cabin.

The head of red cabbage and bag of carrots went a long way toward solving this. We peeled individual leaves off the cabbage and chopped those up for salads. That’s better than slicing wedges, which allows the cabbage to dry out or spoil.

One thing that struck us both is how little body odor we had after only two splash baths a week. We chalked it up to the cool weather and eating small amounts of meat — some sausage and tinned fish. We’re not big meat eaters but this was even less than usual. Between the sausage, cheese, canned tuna, sardines, smoked oysters and chickpeas, we were never lacking for protein. Nor did we dream of hamburgers.

What We Would Bring in the Future

Some things get forgotten. Some things you don’t know you need until you need them. Either way, it’s never a showstopper.

• Sponge/scrubbie combo for doing dishes
• Ship’s rag for wiping up coffee spills, salt water on the galley floor, pasta when the cook pot flips upside down
• Corkscrew
• Capped, not corked, wine

Most important thing we’d bring next time? Wine with a screw top, not a cork. That’s why the bottle of red wine survived the trip — no corkscrew aboard Grit. Something to be remedied immediately upon return.

Just Bring a Corkscrew

Turns out provisioning a small sailboat for two weeks was the perfect blend of satisfaction for what you remembered and nostalgia for what you forgot. A few homemade sausages, some couscous, a head of red cabbage and a bottle of red wine can bring you more pleasure than you can imagine. Just bring a corkscrew.

The Ponies We Came to See

We didn’t sail to Shackleford Banks for the couscous. Read about the wild ponies we came to see in Someone to Stand Watch: What the Wild Ponies of Shackleford Banks Still Know.

What Would You Pack For a Half-year Mule Voyage?

Not only did Julia put together a great provisioning list for this sailing trip, she put together an amazing list for the six-week mule ramble we took together a while back. That became the basis for what you need to carry on your mule if you want to spend half a year riding across America.

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Julia’s side of the voyage at Saddle Under the Stars:

• March
• April
• May

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