Some insanity from the Virgin Islands...

Now while I'm not a big fan of canned corn beef and suchlike I thought you might want to take a moment and do the math on what this stuff from one of the more affordable stores on one of the cheaper islands in the Caribbean actually costs...

Yeah, that's works out to $9.32 a pound!

on the cost of some stuff and why you need to do your math...

Our local grocery here on St Croix has a sale on water this week and on the face of it, as things go, it looks like a good deal...

At first glance.

The subject of the deal is on a cheap no brand water in 16.9 oz bottles that normally gets sold in the store for fifty cents a bottle. The actual deal is three 24 bottle cases for $10.99.

Now, considering the cost of buying 72-bottles at fifty cents a pop would add up to $36 that really is a considerable savings over the normal retail price... Hell, they're almost giving it away!

Fact is I was tempted...

On the boardwalk here in St Croix good quality water (not like the ugly brown horrible industrial sludge they sell you at the local marina/gas dock) is available for ten cents a gallon. So, how does that compare to the cheap, almost giving it away sale, for the bottled stuff?

Seventy-two 16.9 oz bottles adds up to a kiss more than nineteen gallons of water and nineteen goes into $10.99...

Let's call it fifty-seven cents a gallon which is, admittedly, cheap for bottled water but compared to the water on the boardwalk at ten cents a gallon the truth is it comes out as quite expensive.

Anyway, it's just something to keep in mind...

Galley costs...

I can't help but notice that every time I go shopping these days that prices on one thing or another has gone up... a lot!

Yesterday it happened to be propane. We've been paying between $20-$22 for twenty pounds of propane but yesterday it was $27... Quite a jump and it certainly got my attention.

That said, since 20-pounds of propane lasts us right around three months (and we cook/bake a lot), it's not the sort of budget buster grocery staple price hikes can be but, a penny here, a penny there does add up.

For instance, ground turkey used to be a regular part of our shopping list at $1.99 a pound but when it went up by 33% overnight to $2.99 that extra dollar a week has a lot more impact on the quarterly budget than the propane does at $0.42 a week.

On being frugal...

I'm a sucker for articles about how to save money on the food front, they always suck me in and most of the time I feel suckered when the article does not provide the answers I was looking for.

Of course, part of this is because most of those writing about saving money are not actually on budgets and it usually winds up being a short list of things to cut out or use cheaper ingredients... DUH! My favorite, a couple of years back, included the advice to economize by trying a California Champagne instead of French...

Over at Boing Boing today they actually had a pretty good one and you should give it a read. Where it does not work for boat folk is gardening is not really an option but otherwise it makes a whole lot of sense.

On making your own ricotta cheese...

The other day while shopping I noticed that ricotta cheese had had a big price hike to make it simply too expensive for anything but serious entertaining which is silly as ricotta is more of a basic day to day staple...

As it happened the store in question always has near its end day milk on deep discount and as I passed the milk section I wondered why things I don't use are always cheap and on sale while the stuff I want keep going up.

What did not occur to me at the time is that ricotta is so easy to make (even on a boat) that it's really silly to buy it when cheap milk is available.

So it goes...

The cost of cruising... First steps

One way or another when you begin to cruise you will change your eating habits... Face it, it's all part of the gig and it is a lot easier to embrace this as a positive than to bitch and moan and be an unhappy camper.

Some years ago while in the Canary islands we were talking to a couple with a great boat, a large budget, and all the toys, who could not wait to get back to the US of A and quit cruising because they could not find Hellman's mayo (and suchlike) ... REALLY! The fact was on Las Palmas there is really great (exceptional) shopping and any number of excellent mayo's available and all the fixings for making mayo from scratch but for them, life without their favorite brand was just not in the cards...

Which brings us to the bottom line of eating happily on boats is you will have to be able to adapt and if anything, you should look at it as a positive and enjoy it.

Since you will have to adapt, in the long run, it makes a lot of sense to adapt with a plan rather than simply react... Whether it is evolving a more frugal diet, a healthier one, or simply taking the opportunity to get involved with various ethnic foods and means of preparation, it is always easier with a plan! Since the subject at hand is the cost of cruising we will be talking more about the frugal side...

For most folks, meat is the first problem they run into. Meat has a limited shelf life, requires either refrigeration or preservation of some form (canning, drying, smoking), and when you get to far flung places it is often not at all like home in such things like the way cuts of meat are presented or aged. Face it, when a steak is not a steak for a lot of people it is serious culture shock.

Most people simply adapt by cutting back on meat which is no bad thing health or budget wise and some even cut out meat entirely... Both options you should consider or at least factor in to the equation as one of the easiest ways to cut down on the grocery and provisioning bill is to cut back on protein costs to a need rather than want level.

Which might be a good time to point you towards a couple of great links... 10 in 10 Diet is a great resource and makes it both easy and rather tasty to adapt towards a $150 per person per month food cost scenario and The Hummus Blog which I've recently found to be a finest-kind source of frugal and very tasty recipes for a meat light diet.

The cost of cruising...

One of the problems with modern society is the cost of things seldom reflect their actual value... In fact, to say things have become somewhat nuts is something of an understatement!

Down here in the Caribbean very little is produced food-wise, so pretty much anything you find to provision comes from some faraway place. As a result the price really has nothing to do with the cost of the food but everything to do with the cost of getting that food to you and various middlemen taking a profit in the process.

Take the cherries in the picture... Coming all the way from Washington state (and they certainly show the wear and tear) the price is $6.99 a pound which in this case translates to roughly over sixteen cents a cherry! I guess I should feel better as in Japan they often cost as much as a dollar a cherry, so it could be a lot worse. Then again, I am way too cheap to spend that kind of money on low quality cherries!

The other downside is that being at the end of the line of the food train we get the lower quality, picked over and damaged goods at premium prices... Bummer!

Sadly, what few locals foods there are, tend to reflect the price established by the imported products  as opposed to what they actually cost to produce... Which means if someone here was growing cherries he'd price them to match or exceed the imported Washington state cherries which creates an even more distorted market.

Cherries are something that most of us can do without so it is easy to deal with the high prices by simply not buying them but what do you do about the items you really need and staples? How to you keep the food budget in check?

More on that soon...