Heading offshore? Whether it’s a few days or a few weeks, a well-planned galley is your secret weapon. From meal prep strategies to savvy stowage, here’s how to stay well-fed, efficient, and energised at sea (coming from a team that has gotten it down to an art prepping for sail training passages!).
Planning tip 1: Start with a solid meal plan (plus buffer time)
Map out daily meals (including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks) for the expected duration plus 30% extra in case conditions slow you down. This builds in a safety net.
While you’re planning, Emma Garschagen recommends looking ahead to match meals to the expected conditions as well i.e. in choppy conditions, avoid meals like pasta that require a pot of boiling water on the stove and save your spiciest curry until after stomachs have had time to adjust to life at sea.
Personally, we love a rice bowl when the seas get rough!
Want help getting started? Travel Sketch Sailing offers downloadable meal planning templates, along with sample passage plans.
Blue Water Miles also shares a sample provisioning checklist here.
Our tips for pre-departure planning:
- Start with dinner plans and work backwards from there.
- Breakfast: keep it quick and basic
- Lunch: leftovers or wrap‑style sandwiches. Journalist David Schmidt discovered that tortillas survive rough conditions better than sliced bread; wraps don’t fall apart like sandwiches and are easier to eat on deck
- Energy bars are less messy than loose trail mix in big seas
- Match meals to conditions
- Take inventory of what you have onboard before you shop
- Buying and transporting produce: Only buy fruits and vegetables that have never been refrigerated. Produce that has been chilled has about half the shelf life once taken out of refrigeration
- Storage fundamentals: Fruits and vegetables last longest in well‑ventilated, dry and padded storage. Gear hammocks or plastic bins are ideal if they don’t swing into anything in rough seas. Check produce daily and eat or discard anything that shows bruising or mold
- Never store onions and potatoes together. The gas they emit causes potatoes to sprout. Carrots and celery should be wrapped in foil but left slightly open; revitalize them in water if they dry out . Root vegetables, pumpkins and squash are your friends; they can survive weeks at sea!
- Avoid over‑buying perishables
- Hydration and caffeine. Plan on at least two litres of water per person per day and add a 50 % safety margin. Carry extra jerrycans or consider a watermaker. Instant coffee weighs little but you’ll use more than you expect; two packets per cup taste better than one.
Planning tip 2: Organise your storage and use a stowage map
Provisioning isn’t just about what you take, it’s where you put it too. Use airtight containers, label everything, and create a stored-food map. That way, you know exactly where spaghetti, sauces, or snacks are when you need them.
Holly Hendricks recommends removing all cardboard packaging as soon as you get home from the shops. It reduces the risk of bugs getting on board and ensures you aren’t wasting space on extra packaging.
Prep tip 3: Pre-cook, freeze & prioritise one-pot meals
Pre-cooked, ready to eat meals are LIFESAVERS at sea.
Cook ahead and freeze stews, curries, lasagnas, and casseroles. Set your galley’s fridge to “freezer mode” to preserve them. On passage, just reheat and eat. Easy, comforting, and low effort. Additionally, storing meals in vacuum-sealed bags keeps them fresh longer, perfect for busy galleys.
For our overnight course sails, we love pre-made dinners like curry with some rice and naan bread, or a frozen lasagne to chuck in the oven and serve with garlic bread. Depending on where you’re setting sail from, you can usually find some decent pre-made options from Coles, Woolies and Costco.
Travel Sketch Sailing shares ‘10 Meals We Precook To Make Yacht Passages Easier!’ here.
Our tips for pre-cooked meals:
- Kick your voyage off with a pre-cooked dinner on night one. It’ll help make it an easier transition to life offshore. Future you will thank you!
- When storing your pre-cooked meals, use the freezer efficiently. Mix pre‑cooked meals in your freezer so you can pull them out without unpacking everything. Use calm days to replenish the freezer with new cooked meals.
Tip 4: Voyage-friendly meals on the go
For when you’re feeling a little more adventurous in the cooking department…
We like one pot wonders like a 3 Bean Chili during our longer sail training passages. Just chuck a few tins in the pot with some seasoning and serve with tortilla chips – super easy! Or, opt for some comfort food like burgers and coleslaw to keep everyone on board happy. If you’re lucky enough to catch some fish along the way, nothing beats a fish taco with a view of the ocean horizon.
Other dinners you might expect to see on a Southern Cross Yachting course are thai beef salad, kebabs, pad thai and ravioli.
Tip 5: Snacks are king!
As The Boat Galley hints, say goodbye to sit-down meals and hello to the life of grazing.
Something we’ve learnt along the way is that nothing goes down better at the end of a long day on the water than… snacks. We don’t engage in snack discrimination here, it’s totally a personal preference but we usually stock up on items like: chips and dips, olives, cheese and crackers, sliced fruit, hardy nuts & choccy bars. They’re easy to grab and keep morale high.
Outer Passage also swears by home/boat-made hummus!
Tip 6: Tracking your inventory = keeping your sanity
Now this may sound a little overboard (forgive the pun), but we recommend maintaining a checklist or spreadsheet on the go. Here’s the ‘overboard’ part: who ate what when, and what needs replacing? It’s gold, especially if your passage runs longer than expected.
This leads us to our next MUST DO food planning…
Tip 7: Monitoring perishables & stocking strategically
Not all fresh food lasts equally. Group perishables by shelf life and plan meals accordingly.
For longer passages, plan around freezing more ingredients and/or replace some of them with canned food as you go (e.g. tomatoes).
We’ve put together a guide to help plan your perishables and included some tips to help extend their shelf life…
After some trial and error (sorry… it’s inevitable!), you’ll find a system that works for you and your boat. If you have any of your own tried and tested tricks of the trade that deserve a spot on this list, send them through to sailing@southerncrossyacting.com.au.
Happy sailing!
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