How do you cross the Pacific without starving?

Well, for starters, you buy more fresh food than you can manage to eat without it starting to decompose and pollute the cabin with a terrible odor. You also buy more of everything you can think of. More is better. Or so we thought.

When we bought our food in Costa Rica, we naively thought it would be our main source of food until we reached the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.  But regardless of the quantity of fruit and veggies you buy, it has a limited life. Without refrigeration and with the temperature in our cabin exceeding 35 degrees C (that is about 95 fahrenheit for our non-Canadian blogees), some of our fresh produce was more or less cooked before we ate it. The ocean received a nice big portion of our fresh food that was too rotten to eat. We learned that some things don't work- like wrapping oranges in aluminum foil. Have you ever smelled a basket or rotten oranges? You should avoid it.

I also made the mistake of assuming potatoes would last forever. So I ignored the big bag of potatoes we had stored in the closet until a smell so foul was emerging from that closet I had to check on them. They proved my theory wrong as I took a big whiff and the result was that I gagged for a solid minute. Lessons learned- don't take big whiffs of anything you think may be the cause of a rotten baby diaper smell coming from a closet and potatoes don't last forever.

We have managed to get through a good amount of the fresh food we bought, but the only thing left after the 2 week trip to the Galapagos were some eggs, potatoes and onions. Luckily we can buy some more fresh food here in the Galapagos before we head off for our 30 day trip to the Marquesas, but now we know we will survive off canned and dried goods cooked with potatoes and onion for a few weeks.  This will give us the opportunity to shed some of hundreds of pound of weight in cans we have stored on the boat and hopefully allow us to sail even faster to our destination to enjoy all that fresh food that we will be craving- we are already dreaming of all that French cheese and ice cream!