Glorious food

June 2007, somewhere 200 miles west of the Irish coast, and I am down in the galley on board the American maxi yacht Rambler. We are day nine into the Trans-Atlantic race, and clearly I am not hanging around in the galley for a cup of tea. No way, I am hungry, and scavenging for food. There is no choice really, it has got to be a PBJ. You see, each boat has it’s own little twist to the food program, and on the Rambler it is the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. Now on a European boat this would be a sheer impossibility for offshore food as the bread will be completely mauled after three or  four days. The American package that says bread on it, and has something in it that looks like bread on the other hand is perfectly fine, and so on day nine it is no problem making a PBJ sandwich. Fantastic!

With the last minute call to do the Barcelona World Race on the HUGO BOSS, the food program was well down the list, and so when Andy pulled out a big bag of burrito wraps on day three, my jaw dropped to the floor. Not just a couple of packages, but about twenty! Enough to get us to the Southern Ocean! In a second bag we found lots of vacuum packed  slices of cured Spanish ham and big wedges of matured cheese plus a load of tins of tuna. What a luxury and great idea to break to monotone diet of freeze dried food for lunch and dinner. We were eating like kings every lunchtime!

Half way down the Atlantic we decided we needed to keep a bit of it for the way back up, as a feel good thing on the way  home. And so now we have still plenty of the wraps, cheese, tuna and ham. All bar the ham  it has survived the 90 days well. Only one package of ham doesn’t look like it will walk away soon, so we have ditched the others, but man, put in some mayonnaise and sweet chili and garlic sauce and these cheese and tuna baby’s really hit the spot for lunch!

We have another six days of wraps left and plenty of tuna, so we will eat this all  over the next two weeks for sure.