Provisions

What I enjoy, and what Sapphire eats.

Provisions is the page for what I enjoy. Food and drink first, because the galley on a boat is small and it moves, so cooking aboard is about hunger before it is about art. Wing foiling, the paddleboard, swimming and getting anywhere at all make you hungry, and a good day aboard is a fish on the grill outside and a strong mix of vegetables and beans. The fine dining and the tasting menus we save for land, and we take them seriously there. On a passage that runs through the night my husband and I take the watches in turn, and the right start to a watch is a hot bowl, so a Thai curry goes into the pressure cooker before dark.

Then the kit that earns its place on a small boat, the pens, the wing, the knife that opens oysters and shackles, the book I am reading on deck, and the harbour finds, a bakery with a queue worth joining and a bar above a private bay. What Sapphire eats in the books lives here too, and so does what she listens to, she keeps playlists and they arrive here as the books do, and every recipe has been cooked on a gimballed stove that was moving at the time, with the chart plotter lighting the galley green. Cook them at anchor or in a kitchen that holds still, and tell me which one you would put on Sapphire’s table. By the summer of 2027 there is a plate from each of the four books here, so the series comes with a table.

When a bottle or a plate appears here with a maker’s support, the page says so, in the first line.

Buena Vista Social Club

Sunday paella

The pan is wider than the cockpit table, so Sunday paella happens ashore, on a terrace where someone else owns the gas ring. The rice goes in at 13:00 and nobody touches it after that. The socarrat forms underneath on its own, and the only job left is to keep the rosé cold.

Buena Vista Social Club is the record for the wait. The band takes its time with every song, and by the third one the pan has stopped hissing and the first plate is being passed down the table. The rosé is from the region, pale and cold, in a bucket that sweats onto the tiles.

Hermanos Gutiérrez, Los Ojos del Cóndor

Sardines on the spits

The beach shack grills whole sardines on cane spits over driftwood, and the smoke reaches the anchorage before the dinghy does. You eat them with your fingers and a beer so cold the glass fogs. Olives arrive without being ordered.

Two guitars and no words is the right amount of music for a fish that needs both hands. Hermanos Gutiérrez play slowly enough that the sun gets all the way down before the record ends, and the shack owner has usually turned the spits twice by then.

Sara Correia, Do Coração

Clams on the first evening ashore

After a passage, the first meal ashore is clams in a harbour restaurant with paper on the table and bread for the juice. A cold white wine, the house one, poured by someone who has watched boats come in all summer and asks nobody where they came from.

Fado belongs to that evening. Sara Correia sings about the sea and about waiting, and even without the Portuguese you hear which one she means. By the time the bread runs out, the boat has settled in the basin outside for the night.

Ezra Collective, Dance, No One’s Watching

Aperitivo at dusk

The board comes out at 19:00 wherever the boat is. Cured ham, a hard cheese, taralli from the last Italian port, whatever the market had that morning. The spritz is built in the cockpit, and the ice is the one luxury the freezer is asked to keep.

Ezra Collective is loud enough to be heard over the halyards and bright enough to make the neighbouring boat look over. Nobody is watching, as the title says, so the dancing is small and happens between the companionway and the rail.

Bill Evans, Portraits at the Penthouse

The arrival

The anchor goes down over turquoise water after a long day, and the first glass is champagne, poured before the sails are even properly flaked. On the boat it is Franciacorta, the bottle that lives flat in the bilge for exactly this moment. Sapphire keeps the same bottle aboard Alcyone.

Bill Evans at the piano, recorded in a room with the lights low, is the only music that fits an anchorage going quiet. The engine is off, the water is clear enough to count the chain links, and the oysters, if there are oysters, came from the harbour that morning.

Odetto, C’est bleu l’amour

Cap Corse at the beach club

Cap Corse is the Corsican aperitif that tastes of quinine and orange peel, and the beach club pours it over ice with prosecco and a splash of soda. It is drier than an Aperol spritz and it does not go sweet by the second glass. Sapphire drinks this one, and never the other.

The soundtrack is French and unhurried. Odetto’s C’est bleu l’amour drifts out across the loungers while the tapas arrive on a long table, and the afternoon has no further plan than another round and a swim before the light goes.