Location: Moorea, French Polynesia
Good evening! Or morning, depending on where you are. This morning, we dropped anchor in Moorea after a quick two-day passage. Shoutout to watch team 2 for doing most (all) of the work dropping sails, anchoring, and putting the boat to bed.
When I woke up around 7 am to music blasting way too loud in the galley, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to finish off our EFR scenarios for a handful of students. So I went around during wakeups and asked them to tend to my various ailments. Ani helped me from a fall on deck, Mars stopped my serious bleeding, and Ruby rescued me after Colbie tried to kill me with peanut butter.
After breakfast, I went off to our last big provision of the semester. Compared to the last shopping outing Meg and I did in Nuku Hiva, the store in Moorea was MAGICAL. Shane and I packed 6 carts full of apples and oranges (which we havent had in about a month), 20 KG of flour, 33 bell peppers, 27 onions, SALT, a LOT of cheese, hot sauce for Meg, and much, much more.
What is the provisioning process, you might ask? Well, thank goodness that your Regional Provisioner is skipper today. Provisioning at Seamester is an art. Its an art that involves meticulous planning and managing chaos simultaneously. What do you do when the bread gets moldy? What do you do when 5 KG of chicken isnt actually 5 KG of edible chicken? What do you do when shopping for 8 different unique dietary restrictions in small, remote grocery stores? Answer you figure it out. To start a new round of provisioning, I first get a sense of our schedule and resources where are we going to be, where can we actually get food, when do we need packed lunches, how do we get all that food back to the boat, and how long do we need to buy food for? Then I take a look at our job wheel and ask the next batch of head chefs what they want to cook for 29 people. That usually involves some compromise since we probably shouldnt have 4 pasta meals back to back or brownies for breakfast, plain noodles for lunch, and breakfast for dinner (yes, this has actually been suggested once). Students in their menu planning are considerate of dietary restrictions and limited by one meat meal a day due to freezer capacity and one use of the oven per day (if we had a working oven RIP). Other limitations include how long fresh vegetables and fruit will last in the fridge, so often I have to make substitutions with canned foods and other proteins. Then I make a shopping list. On the day of the provision, the shoppers take as many bags as they can carry, their credit card, and hopes and dreams of fresh tofu, a wide selection of vegetables, and non-scary-looking chicken. Its never a perfect store, however (except Epi in Antigua, shoutout Epi), and there will always be substitutions and a thorough reallocation of the vegetables available. Then I rework the menus, print them for the galley, and hope nothing goes wrong. Except it always does. Quantities and proportions are always a work in progress; things go bad unexpectedly, someone forgot a dietary restriction, or pasta turns into paste-a (@Emma sorry). Nevertheless, we always thank the chefs for their effort, and we figure it out. And every complaint about their existence on Argo, I will continue to defend the chickpeas until my Seamester days are done. Long live the chickpea.
The students went on a super cool hike today, so I’ll get a guest star in here tomorrow to recount their day.
Thank you, Argo Spring 2026, for this awesome group of students and adventures!