The Bay of Biscay does not forgive a half-empty locker. You leave a marina pontoon, you point south or south-west, and for the next two to four days there is no boulangerie, no market stall, no Carrefour on the ring road. Everything you eat is already aboard or it does not happen. I have done the crossing both ways, from Brittany down to Spain and back, and the provisioning mistakes I made the first time taught me more than any checklist.
Start with how long the leg actually takes. A direct Biscay passage from the Raz de Sein or the Chenal du Four down to A Coruna is roughly 330 to 380 nautical miles depending on your departure point. At a cruising average of five knots that is about three days at sea. The honest planning rule I now use is to carry food for the passage plus three extra days, because a weather window can close and pin you in port, or a forecast can turn and slow you to a crawl. So a three-day leg means provisioning for six days of full meals.
Water comes before food
You can ration food for a week without much harm. Water is different. The sensible cruising figure is around five to six litres of fresh water per person per day for drinking, cooking and a wipe-down wash, and at least three litres of that is pure drinking water you should never touch for anything else. For a crew of four on a six-day worst-case that is well over 100 litres just for drinking and cooking, before you allow a drop for the washing up.
So I fill the tanks, then I add bottled backup on top. Bulk supermarket water is cheap in France, a six-pack of 1.5-litre bottles costs around 1.20 euros at Carrefour, about 13 cents a litre, and the five and six-litre containers stack flat in the bilge. I carry at least 20 litres of bottled water as a sealed reserve I never open unless the tank fails. If your boat has a single tank with no divider, that reserve is not optional, it is the difference between a problem and an emergency. I dig into the wider question of tank planning in the guide to crossing the Bay of Biscay in a small boat, which is worth reading alongside this one.
Watch the salt too. On a passage you sweat, and a hot diesel engine or a beat to windward dries you out faster than you notice. I carry rehydration sachets or simply a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon into the water bottle, because plain water alone on a long sweaty leg leaves the crew flat and headachy. It is a tiny weight for a real difference in how people feel on the second night.
Gas is a ration too
The other consumable nobody plans for is cooking gas. Run out of gas mid-Biscay and your hot one-pot suppers become cold tins. A small butane cartridge gives roughly two hours of burn time at full heat, and a typical cruising stove gets through gas faster than you expect once you are heating water for coffee, cooking dinner and warming a flask for the night watch. I carry a full spare cylinder or a stack of cartridges sized for the passage plus the same three-day margin I allow for food, and I light the cooker on the lowest flame that does the job, with a windshield up, because wind across the burner wastes gas and cooks nothing.
Three categories of food
I sort everything into three boxes before it goes aboard.
The first box is rough-weather food. This is what you eat when the boat is heeled, the cooker is on gimbals and nobody wants to stand at the galley. Think tins you can eat cold from the can if you have to, flapjacks, oat bars, dried fruit, nuts, crackers and hard cheese. A wedge of comte or mimolette keeps for a week unrefrigerated if you wrap it in waxed paper and stow it cool, and it gives you real calories when a watch-keeper has no appetite for a proper plate.
The second box is the proper meals, the things you cook when the weather lets you. I favour one-pot food at sea because it means one pan, one washing-up job and no juggling. The recipes I lean on are the same ones in my notes on one-pot meals for a French passage, and they all share three traits: they tolerate a wide range of cooking times, they do not spoil if the meal slips an hour, and they reheat without complaint.
The third box is morale food. Do not skip this. Good coffee, a bar of decent chocolate, a tin of something you actually like. On the second night of a lumpy crossing, a hot drink and something sweet does more for the watch than another safety brief.
What to buy in France before you go
France is the best larder you will provision from before any Atlantic leg, and the timing tricks matter. I cover the market rhythm and the lunchtime closure in detail in the piece on provisioning a boat in France at markets and supermarkets, and the short version is this: do your big restock at a hypermarket on the edge of town, not at the pricey express shop in the marina village.
For the crossing itself I buy:
- Long-life UHT milk, because fresh milk will not survive and you will want it for coffee and porridge.
- Eggs, which keep for weeks in a cool locker if you turn the box upside down every two or three days so the yolk does not settle. Coated and stored cool they last far longer, well past the few weeks a crossing needs.
- Dried pasta, rice and couscous, which weigh little, never spoil and cook fast on a single burner.
- Tinned tomatoes, beans, tuna, sardines and a couple of tins of confit or cassoulet for a no-effort dinner.
- A net of onions, carrots and potatoes, the three vegetables that survive a passage without a fridge.
Bread is the one fresh thing worth a thought. A French baguette costs around 1.09 euros from an artisan boulangerie and is stale by the next morning, so I buy two on departure day, eat them in the first 24 hours, and rely on crackers, part-baked rolls and the flour bag after that. If you bake, a no-knead loaf in a covered pot on the hob works at sea in settled weather.
Stow it where the boat is happiest
A crossing is no time to discover that your tins have shifted into the bilge and your fruit has rolled under the chart table. I bag everything by category, label the bags, and write a simple stowage list taped inside a locker door so the off-watch crew can find dinner without waking the skipper. Heavy tins go low and central. Anything in glass gets wrapped or, better, decanted, because a smashed jar of passata in a seaway is a horrible job. Fruit and veg go in netting where air can move around them, never sealed in plastic where they sweat and rot.
A galley list, not a guess
I do not provision a Biscay leg from memory. I write a meal plan, breakfast, lunch and dinner, for the passage plus three margin days, then work backwards to the shopping list. That sounds fussy until the third night when you are tired and someone asks what is for dinner, and the answer is on a card taped inside the locker rather than a rummage through the bilge in a seaway. The plan also stops the classic mistake of buying eight days of fresh food and three days of dry, when a passage wants the opposite.
A worked plan for four people over a six-day worst case comes out at roughly: a dozen meals built around pasta and rice, six breakfasts of porridge or bread and eggs, six lunches of cheese, saucisson and crackers, and a deep bench of snacks for the watches. That is maybe 4 kg of dry carbohydrate, 18 to 24 tins, two dozen eggs, a couple of hard cheeses and a saucisson, plus the fresh fruit and veg that survives. It weighs less than people fear and it leaves no waste.
The last thing I do before slipping the lines is cook the first night's meal in port and stow it in a lidded pot. On the first evening out, when the crew is finding their sea legs and Biscay is reminding everyone why it has a reputation, nobody has to cook. You just heat and eat. That single habit has saved more crossings than any piece of kit I own.
