How to provision during a pandemic

The main thing I’ve learned over the last week or so while under various forms of lockdown in St. Lucia, is about the creativity and resourcefulness of sailors when trying to overcome obstacles. At the beginning of the week, we were under 24 hour lockdown, which meant not leaving the boat for any reason other than medical emergency! At this point, I learned an important provisioning rule (which may be applicable for land bound folks in the future), which is to have at least two weeks worth of canned or dry food and necessities (ie. toilet paper) at all times in your lockers/cupboard. Fortunately, we had that but the prospect of living off it for the next few weeks wasn’t appealing!!

A few days after the initial 24 hour lockdown, restrictions were eased enough to open the grocery stores, but we found 1 to 4 hour waits in the line (standing 6 feet apart) to get into the stores. Once I got into our local Marketplace, where the line was only 1 hour, I found 1 apple, 1 tomato, milk, oj and coffee. It was time for some sailor ingenuity to kick in!

One fellow, who lives on his boat in the bay with his wife and two young children, works locally and has lots of contacts. He helped to organize the marina/bay crowd with alternatives for provisioning vegetables, eggs, fish and bakery items. A volunteer would collect orders and money for either the bay folks or the marina folks and then call in the order, meet the vendor and delivered to the various boats.

I was the marina volunteer for the bakery. We needed twenty items in order for the baker to deliver so we combined the marina and bay orders. When the bakery truck arrived, we sorted out the different orders in the parking lot and the volunteer for the bay went off in his dinghy to deliver while I hoofed off with my canvas bag full of warm bread & buns for the marina. Below is a picture of me (from across the dock) on my delivery route. It was a great opportunity to get some exercise, meet folks (from 6 feet away) that I hadn’t met yet and to catch up with friends in the marina.

The vegetable and egg orders worked in similar fashion but the fish order was a little different. We were provided with a menu and instructed to call Lucian Blue Ocean Seafood directly. After doing so (and getting no answer), I tried What’s App. Someone responded to my specific request with “np”, which I presumed to mean ‘no problem’. The next day, I used What’s App to inquire about the time & place of pick-up. The response I got was “Good Morning”. Apparently, I neglected to use the proper protocol so I repeated the question proceeded by an appropriate greeting. The response I got was “today”. Around 5pm that afternoon, I got a hang up call from Lucian Blue Ocean Seafood. When I inquired via What’s App, they said that deliveries would be “first thing tomorrow morning”.

I dared not ask what time “first thing” in the morning meant but the next day I found out that it meant 2pm in the afternoon. Finally, the fish ordered arrived but they didn’t quite get my order right. I had asked for 2 salmon steaks and 2 Mahi fillets. They had 5 lbs of salmon and 2 frozen Mahi (2 foot long with head & tail in tact), none of which would fit in my tiny freezer. Thankfully, they let me take half of the salmon and cancel the Mahi. Next time, I’ll stick with vege, egg and bakery orders!!

This week it looks like we’ll be back to a 7pm to 5am lockdown with access to essential services most days. This will alleviate some of the issues and I’m confident that whatever challenges we face, the sailor ingenuity will come through. In the meantime, we will entertain ourselves hanging out in our very own tent city, sharing virtual toasts at sundown and appreciating the full moon, international space station and other celestial sightings at night!!!