Corsica will feed you beautifully and then leave you stranded a mile from a baguette, sometimes on the same day. The big harbours have everything. The anchorages have a campsite minimarket if you are lucky and nothing at all if you are not. A cruise here lives or dies on whether you read that pattern and provision to it, rather than assuming the next bay will sort you out. After several seasons of getting it wrong and then mostly right, here is how I keep the boat fed, watered and fuelled around the island.
The harbours that actually have shops
Not all Corsican stops are equal. Two of them carry the full kit, and you should plan your big resupplies around them.
Ajaccio is the most complete. The city has major supermarkets within reach of both marinas, proper chandlery, and the repair trades you need when something breaks. If you are doing one serious stock-up in a fortnight, do it here. The airport also makes it the natural crew-change point, so it is where you arrive lean and leave loaded. I have written more about the two marinas and the gulf in my guide to the Ajaccio marina, and the practical truth is that Charles Ornano, the larger of the two, is the easier base for a big shop because there is room to land a trolley-load on the pontoon.
Calvi, on the north-west coast, is the other harbour with real depth of services: supermarkets, chandlers and professional yacht facilities. Between Ajaccio in the south-west and Calvi in the north-west you have the western coast's two reliable provisioning anchors.
Bonifacio and Porto-Vecchio in the south sit a tier down but still cover most needs. Bonifacio's harbour provides fuel, water and provisioning, and the town up on the cliff has shops, though hauling bags up from the marina is a workout. Porto-Vecchio has a well-equipped marina with good provisioning including the smarter end of the grocery world. Saint-Florent in the north has a working town behind the marina with a market and enough shops to resupply properly, which I have covered in the piece on Saint-Florent and the Cap Corse.
Everywhere else, assume less. Macinaggio, Centuri, Propriano and the smaller harbours have a shop or two and basics, fine for topping up bread, fruit and a bottle of wine, but not for a fortnight's stores.
Water: where to fill and how much to carry
Fresh water is on the pontoons in every proper marina around the island. When you take a transit berth at Ajaccio, Calvi, Saint-Florent, Bonifacio or Porto-Vecchio, water and usually electricity come with the standard berth, and you fill your tanks as part of the stop. Some marinas split their tariffs, with a cheaper berth that gives you water but no power, which is fine if you only want to fill up and are happy running off your own batteries.
The trap is the anchorages. The bays where you most want to linger, Rondinara, the Agriates beaches, the Sanguinaires, have no water supply at all. A campsite minimarket might sell you bottled water, but you are not filling a 200-litre tank from a shop shelf. So the rhythm is simple: fill the tanks every time you take a marina berth, and treat a long anchorage stretch as a draw-down on what you carried in.
I plan on a realistic daily figure. Two people living aboard and swimming off the boat, washing in seawater and rinsing in fresh, get through somewhere around 20 to 40 litres a day between them once you include cooking and the odd deck wash. Carry that maths in your head and you will know, three days into an anchorage cluster, whether you can stay another night or need to run back to a marina tap. Running a tank dry on the hook off the Agriates with the libeccio building is exactly the kind of mistake that turns a relaxed cruise tense.
Fuel and bunkering
Fuel is more concentrated than water. The four main ports, Ajaccio, Bonifacio, Porto-Vecchio and Calvi, all have fuel berths where you can take diesel and petrol alongside, and Porto-Vecchio even has a company that delivers fuel to the port by truck for larger requirements. The smaller harbours are hit and miss, so do not count on topping up at a fishing port halfway round.
A sailing boat that uses the engine sparingly can comfortably plan its fuel around these four stops, and I treat them as the bunkering backbone of any circuit. If you are motoring a lot, because the libeccio has died and left you flat calm, watch the gauge and bunker at the next major port rather than gambling on a minor one. Fuel berths also tend to have queues in August, so I fill in the morning before the day boats come back in.
A provisioning plan for a Corsican circuit
Here is the system I use, and it has kept me from going hungry or thirsty around the island.
I treat Ajaccio or Calvi as the major resupply, depending on where I start, and I load heavy there: the tinned and dry stores, the wine, the things that keep. I fill water and fuel to the brim at the same stop. Then I work a leg of anchorages, drawing down water and eating through the fresh food, topping up bread and fruit at whatever minimarket the bays offer. Before the tanks get low, I aim for the next proper harbour, refill everything, and start the cycle again.
The southern leg around Bonifacio and the Rondinara and southern anchorages is a good example of the pattern in miniature: fuel and water in Bonifacio, then a string of bays where you live off what you carried, then back to a harbour tap before it bites. The key is never letting two consumables get low at once. Water and fuel both empty, three days from a marina, with a blow forecast, is the situation to avoid, and a little planning makes it impossible.
Gas, ice and the small things
Beyond food and water, two small items catch cruisers out. Camping gas refills are not universal, and the bottle fittings differ between countries, so if you are arriving from the UK or northern Europe with a non-French regulator and bottle, sort an adaptor or a swap before you leave the mainland rather than hunting one in a Corsican village. The bigger harbours and their chandlers can usually help, but a remote anchorage cannot.
Ice is the other one. Most marina fuel berths and chandlers sell bagged ice, and in the heat of a Corsican August a daily bag is the difference between cold beer and warm disappointment when you are cruising without refrigeration or trying to spare the batteries. I buy ice at the same stop as fuel and water, so the resupply is one trip rather than three.
What to buy where
The island rewards buying local. The markets in Ajaccio, Calvi and Saint-Florent sell Corsican charcuterie, cheese, fruit and bread that beat anything you would carry from the mainland, and they keep well enough for a few days at sea. I load up on the durable stuff at the big supermarkets and use the markets for the things that make eating aboard a pleasure rather than a chore. The minimarkets in the anchorages are for emergencies and bread, priced accordingly.
Get the rhythm right and Corsica is one of the easiest cruising grounds in the Mediterranean to keep a boat stocked, because the good harbours are genuinely good. Get it wrong and you spend your holiday making unplanned dashes back to a supermarket. The difference is nothing more than reading which stops have what, and filling up while you can. If you are choosing a boat with the tankage and stowage to make this kind of cruising comfortable, the practical checks I run before buying are in my piece on buying a used sailboat.
