The boat provisioning checklist, sorted by locker instead of by aisle

Most provisioning lists are shopping lists: they follow the aisles of a shop. On board that ordering is useless, because the question on departure day is not "what do I buy?" but "where does it go, and how long does it last there?". So this list is sorted by where a thing will be stowed. It also carries the non-food half, which almost no list has, and which ruins a week afloat far more reliably than a forgotten cheese.

Quantities are not repeated here: they are in our provisioning menus by guests and days, and the arithmetic behind them is in the yacht provisioning guide. What follows is the part you tick.

Provisioning or resupplying: which one are you preparing?

In French the two words — avitaillement and ravitaillement — circulate as synonyms and are not quite. Avitailler a boat means to equip it before departure with everything it will need: food, water, ice, fuel, consumables. That is the broad term, and it is the one that describes what you are doing the night before. Ravitailler means to resupply along the way — and in the fuel trade the word is often reserved for topping up the tanks.

The distinction earns its keep because it separates two lists that people wrongly merge: what comes aboard at the start, and what gets topped up at the next real town. Buying ten days at once is buying waste.

Why sort by locker rather than by aisle

A yacht fridge is smaller than it looks, the freezer is often a drawer, and dry storage means shallow lockers. Volume, not budget, is the real constraint. Sorting the list by destination does three things at once: you can see immediately when a category is overflowing, you stow everything in one pass instead of unpacking three times, and you know where to find things after dark without waking the saloon.

The fresh half, for the first three days

All of this goes into the coldest part of the fridge and gets eaten before anything else.

• Salad leaves, fresh herbs, ripe tomatoes, cucumbers
• Fragile fruit: peaches, apricots, grapes, figs
• Fish for the first two dinners, bought the day you cook it
• Fresh meat or poultry for one dinner, if the first night is at anchor
• Milk, yoghurt, butter, fresh cheeses
• Bread for the day — one day, not one week

The half that keeps

This is the half that earns its space. It lives in the coolest, darkest lockers, wedged so it cannot move when the boat heels.

• Hard and pressed cheeses, vacuum-packed where possible
• Whole cured sausage rather than sliced packs
• Eggs — out of the fridge if they were never in one, kept in their own tray
• Root vegetables, onions, garlic, courgettes, aubergines, lemons
• Apples, pears, citrus: the fruit that survives a seaway
• A spare block of butter and a spare hard cheese for the end of the week

The store cupboard

Bought once at the start, it turns leftovers into meals for the rest of the trip.

• Pasta, rice, couscous, pulses dried or in jars
• Tinned tomatoes, tuna or sardines, olives, capers
• Olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, dried herbs, stock
• Coffee, tea, sugar, long-life milk
• Flour, dry biscuits, dried fruit and nuts for the night watches
• Honey and jam — breakfast on the day the bread is no longer fresh

Drinks, water and ice

• Drinking and cooking water: count three litres per person per day, nearer four in August, even on a boat with tanks — people drink what is within reach.
• Bottles or cans split between several lockers rather than stacked in one: this is weight and trim as well as storage
• Wine, beer and aperitifs in the bilge, the coolest place on the boat
• Juice, cordials, tonic and lemons for the late afternoons
• Ice: two bags at the start, one for the cool bag and one to hold the fridge while you load

The non-food list nobody writes down

This is the half of the list that appears on no list, and the half whose absence is noticed first.

• Strong bin bags in two sizes, plus one dedicated bag for glass
• Kitchen paper, tea towels, sponges, biodegradable washing-up liquid — the water you swim in is the water the washing-up goes into
• Sealed boxes, cling film, foil: something to close everything you have opened
• A soft cool bag for the morning market run
• Toilet paper that breaks down, the kind marine heads can take
• Matches or a lighter, batteries, a head torch for the galley
• One knife that actually cuts and a board: the constraint in a galley is worktop, not the number of pans
• Non-slip matting on a roll, elastics, string, clothes pegs
• Sunscreen, seasickness tablets and plasters — the boat's medical kit is the skipper's business, but these three are always the ones missing

What should not come aboard at all

• Cardboard. Strip it on the pontoon: corrugations are the finest way ever devised to carry cockroach eggs into a galley
• Glass where an alternative exists. Weight, noise, breakage, and a bulky waste item to live with for days
• Large packaging. Decant into boxes: you win half the volume and you can see what is left
• Frozen food bought for the week when the freezer is a drawer. It thaws on the first hot day
• Anything that needs an oven when the boat has no oven

How to use it on departure day

Split the list into two columns: what comes aboard at the start and what will be topped up halfway — bread, fish, fruit and salad are bought again on the way, everything else is loaded once. On the day, one person ticks while another stows: that is what stops three bags of coffee ending up in three different lockers.

Two habits that win the next trip: photograph the galley when it is full, and write down at the end what came home untouched. That note is your real provisioning list, calibrated to your crew and your boat rather than to an average one.

Where GetEats fits into this list

GetEats is a marketplace of named farms and producers: each one packs its own part of an order, usually the evening before the day you chose, which is what makes the fresh half arrive a day old rather than a week old. In practice that covers the first two sections of this page well, plus much of the store cupboard; the non-food half is a job for ashore.

Being straight about the current stage: our network is densest where our producers already are, and we are building it along the French and Italian coasts right now. If you are provisioning a charter, send us your dates, headcount and port through support first, and we will tell you what we can genuinely deliver rather than promise it. You can also browse the producers on the map and see what is available today.