People stock a two-week cruise as if they are crossing an ocean. They are not. France is a coastline of ports a day-sail apart, with a market in most of them and a supermarket within walking distance of nearly every marina. The trick to provisioning a fortnight here is to buy less than you think, then top up as you go. Overbuy and you carry rotting fruit, sour milk and a guilty bag of soft tomatoes you throw over the side on day five.
Here is the way I plan it, refined over several summers of cruising the Atlantic coast and Brittany.
Split the fortnight into a base and three top-ups
The base shop is the dry, heavy, long-life stuff that does not care how long it sits aboard. Buy all of it before you leave, ideally at a hypermarket where it is cheapest. This is the pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes, beans, tuna, UHT milk, coffee, oil, salt, the wine, the snacks. Roughly 14 days of carbohydrate and tinned protein, bought once.
The top-ups are the fresh food, and you buy those in three or four hits over the fortnight, port by port. Fresh bread daily because a baguette at about 1.09 euros from the boulangerie is dead by the next morning. Fruit and veg every three or four days at a market. Meat and fish the day you plan to cook them. This rhythm keeps your lockers light, your food fresh, and your money in your pocket, because the worst value in France is the town-centre express shop where the same bottle of wine that costs three to five euros at the hypermarket sells for double.
The catch is the French clock. Much of provincial France shuts for lunch, roughly midday to 1400, and many supermarkets close Sunday afternoon or all day Sunday. I learned the rhythm the hard way and now plan every shore run around it, which I set out in full in the guide to provisioning a boat in France at markets and supermarkets. The single rule that saves you: top up on Saturday if you are making landfall on a Sunday.
How much water for two weeks
Water planning is where two-week cruisers either relax or panic, and most do neither well. The working figure is five to six litres of fresh water per person per day for drinking, cooking and a basic wash, with at least three litres of that kept aside purely for drinking. A more comfortable cruising allowance, with proper showers and generous dishwashing, runs to 70 to 80 litres per person per day, which no small boat can carry, so on a fortnight cruise you manage somewhere in between.
The point is you do not need to carry two weeks of water. You carry tank capacity plus a sealed bottled reserve, and you refill the tanks at the marina tap every few days. French marina water is drinkable and the fill is usually free or a couple of euros on the meter. I keep 20 litres of bottled water in the bilge as the reserve that never gets touched until the tank runs dry, and I treat the tank as a rolling supply, not a fixed ration. Bulk bottled water is cheap if you do want a stock, a six-pack of 1.5-litre bottles runs about 1.20 euros at Carrefour, roughly 13 cents a litre, far less than the single bottles the marina shop charges for.
A simple discipline halves your fresh-water use without anyone noticing. Wash up and rinse vegetables in seawater first, then a quick fresh rinse. Shower ashore at the marina rather than aboard, because the marina has water you are not carrying. Catch rain off the bimini in a heavy shower if you are anchored out for days. None of this is hardship on a coastal cruise where the next tap is a day-sail away, but it is the difference between topping up every three days and every six.
What actually keeps aboard for two weeks
After a few summers I trust certain foods to survive a fortnight without a fridge and I have stopped buying the ones that betray me.
These keep well in a cool locker for the full two weeks: hard cheese wrapped in waxed paper, cured saucisson, eggs if you turn them every couple of days, onions, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, apples, oranges, UHT milk, and anything tinned or vacuum-packed. Eggs in particular surprise visitors, kept cool and turned they last well beyond a fortnight, and coated they will hold for months.
These do not last and should be bought to eat within a day or two: bread, soft cheese in summer heat, leaf salad, ripe tomatoes, berries, fresh fish and any fresh meat you cannot cook the same day. The fridge question is its own subject, and if you are running a cool box or a small compressor unit it changes the maths considerably, which I dig into in the notes on refrigeration on a French summer cruise.
A worked example: four people, fourteen days
For a crew of four on a typical Atlantic or Brittany fortnight, my base shop is roughly:
- 5 kg of pasta and rice combined.
- 24 tins between tomatoes, beans, tuna, sardines and a couple of ready cassoulets.
- 12 litres of UHT milk.
- A net each of onions, carrots and potatoes.
- 2 dozen eggs.
- Coffee, oil, salt, sugar, a stack of crackers.
- Wine and beer to taste, bought at the hypermarket where it is half the express-shop price.
Then over the fortnight I do three market top-ups for fresh produce, buy bread daily, and pick up fish or meat the day I cook it. Mussels are the cheap fresh treat on this coast, around 7.49 to 9.87 euros a kilo and a kilo feeds one person as a main, so a moules supper for four costs less than a single pizza ashore. The recipes that turn a market haul into supper are in the piece on galley meals from a French market haul.
Stow it so you can find it
The other half of provisioning is stowage, and a fortnight of food disappears into a small boat unless you have a system. I group everything by type and write a one-line stowage map taped inside a locker door: tins under the port settee, dry goods in the forepeak, fresh in the cool box, drinks in the bilge. Without it, by day four nobody can find the tuna and you buy a second tin you did not need.
Rotate as you go. Fresh food bought first gets eaten first, and I keep the newest top-up at the back so the older stock comes to hand. Heavy tins and bottled water go low and central to keep the boat's motion easy. Glass jars get wrapped or, better, decanted into plastic, because a smashed jar of passata in a seaway is a job nobody wants. Fruit and veg live in netting where air moves around them, never sealed in a bag where they sweat and rot within days.
The forgotten extras
Two weeks is long enough that the small consumables run out and ruin a good cruise. Cooking gas is the big one, a small butane cartridge gives only about two hours of full-heat burn, so carry a spare cylinder or a stack of cartridges and you never face a cold supper. Then the boring list that always gets left behind: washing-up liquid, kitchen roll, bin bags, matches or a lighter, foil, cling film, salt, oil and coffee. I keep a standing two-week list on my phone and tick it off before every cruise, because the thing you forget is never the thing you would think of.
The result is a boat that eats well for two weeks, never carries more than a few days of fresh food at once, and arrives home with empty lockers instead of a bin bag of waste. Provision light, top up often, and let the French coastline do the rest of the shopping for you.
