Never Have I Ever
Rebecca’s Facebook status update last night:
Never have I ever (until now) spent an entire day shopping for food and drinks! We now have a salon filled with provisions that we will need to find room for. Need to do some major organization tomorrow!
That is fact. We hadn’t actually intended on doing that much provisioning yesterday. Instead we had planned on going out to do it today. When we visited the car rental place to inquire about rates and found that they had one available that we could take right then, we jumped at the opportunity.
Our new neighbor, stopped pretty much where our anchor is located!
It’s amazing how with only a bit of a tour by our friends, we are now able to find all of the major stores on our own. Driving on the left side of the road (in a conventional North American left hand drive car) took only a bit of getting used to. At least the car was an automatic, not one with a standard transmission like all of the other automobiles that we have borrowed in the islands.
Even with the car we did have to make more than one trip back to the boat though. After filling the trunk and back seat with almost a $1000.00 worth of food and alcohol at Cost-U-Less, we returned to Yacht Haven Grande to begin the multi-step process of getting the goods back to the boat.
- Unload stuff from car onto sidewalk
- Transfer stuff to dinghy dock
- Transfer stuff from dinghy dock into tender
- Drive to boat
- Transfer stuff from tender to One Love
- Return to shore to repeat the process all over again
Yes, stops at multiple stores were required: Cost-U-Less, PriceSmart, Kmart, Fruit Bowl, Pueblo. Believe me, when we set out earlier in the day, we had no plans to return after dark but that is exactly what happened. Are we all done? Hardly! We still need to pick up all of our fresh produce and that won’t take place until Monday.
Only the tip of the iceberg!
What’s on for today? I wish I could say rest or play but that’s not the case. I have an electrician that I am scheduled to pick up on the dinghy dock at 9:00 AM who is going to help with the inverter/charger swap. We also need to return the rental car. When all that is done we need to tackle the job of finding a place to store all of the food and booze that we purchased. That, alone, will be a full day’s work.
Which brings me to a bit of a realization that I came to as we drove around yesterday. A realization that I’m sure our experienced charter friends know all too well. My guess is that most guests paying for a week’s charter assume that the money (charter fee, gratuity) they are trading for their vacation is paying for a week’s worth of work by the crew. In reality, with the several days of prep before the charter and the work that goes into cleaning up after the charter, it probably is closer to two full work weeks. This is not a complaint but merely an observation that I hadn’t fully grasped myself until yesterday. This is why when we will be doing back to back charters with only 1 day in between them (Christmas and New Years for example) we will need to employ delivery services to help with all of the running around that we have been doing. I’m sure all this will get easier and more streamlined as we gain experience. Right now we’re just looking forward to the fun of actually doing the charter!
I was so tempted to sneak these into our shopping basket!
Wait until you guys have back to back charters. Its work!!!!
No doubt.
I provision for 2 people for a month, except for milk, fresh fruit and veges which we replenish as we go. Also, I make my own bread and desserts. I’d be very interested in seeing your solutions to food storage. I am fortunate to have quite a bit of storage shelving in my galley and a pretty large refrigerator/freezer. My solution was to create a “pantry” under the stateroom bed using plastic file boxes from Target. This system is working for me but I’m always interested in learning new and/or better ideas.
I remember you briefly talking about this issue in an earlier post but couldn’t find any posts detailing your solutions.
We go through the very same process of loading provisions onto the boat! LOL It is a lot of work and takes me an entire day, if not 2 days, to get it purchased, loaded onto the boat, and then properly stowed! Shew! Did I mention that it’s a lot of WORK! But I love it!
I enjoy your blog and look forward to reading your posts everyday!
While One Love is a relatively large vessel it does not have a lot of space for food storage. Rebecca spent over half the day yesterday tucking provisions into areas where they will be most accessible. We have a lot of space under the bunks but that is not super convenient to access while guests are on board.
Just the preparation you guys are doing sounds exciting and very planful of your guests!
It’ll all pay off.