Our wonderfully patient and fantastic friend Caroline has been driving us around for a few days while we run errands and pick up cartloads of food to provision the boat for 6 months in the Bahamas! We’ve been trying to work in some fun in between shopping though, and went to the inlet and the beach, amongst other things!

There were even kiteboarders playing around out by the inlet that we sat and watched for a while! Still a little cold out, but at least it’s sunny!

We started our shopping run with Publix for the basic stuff. We ended up with the cart overflowing…which is literally the most stuff I’ve ever purchased at one time.  We realized halfway through that we really did need to make a run to Costco so we didn’t even get all of our list!

We fit all of this stuff into Caroline’s little Jeep and then shuffle it down the dock, down the ladder to the dinghy dock, and into the dinghy.  By using our tetris skills we managed to fit all of the groceries and all 3 of us into the dinghy to get it all back to the boat, where we managed to put it all away into the boat.  Once everything was in a locker somewhere it’s like it never even happened! The boat just swallows stuff!

Hung out on the boat a little bit and then took the dinghy across the river to get some dinner, which was delicious! We rode back in the dark, which is always a bit sketch, but we made it home safe!

….aaaand here are a few pictures of Duster looking adorable and napping up on deck.

We met up with Caroline again and went to downtown Fort Pierce to get some amazing fruit smoothie breakfast bowls!

The Costco is an hour south in West Palm, so we decided to make the pilgrimage down there and hit up a bunch of stuff while we’re there!  We started with the scuba store to pick up a small tank for “just in case” on the boat. Managed to find a small one that they happened to have for sale used! Excellent purchase! We also stopped by the freediving store next door and I got my first spear pole! Yay! So.. once we get down south, hopefully I can bring home dinner for a change!

We also went to the mall to the Lush store that sells soaps and stuff.  They had these little boat shaped bath bombs. Super cute, but I don’t have a bath tub!

Then… Costco!  We went down every aisle as usual and didn’t even find everything on our list! But…this cart was overflowing also! We got a ton of food.  Basics like cans of beans and corn, packs of bacon to freeze, etc.  We also got huge boxes of chips because they’re way more expensive in the Bahamas and we’ve got the cargo space for them!

Caroline saved the day by bringing a cooler from home for all of the cold food we brought and we pretty much filled it all the way up! Here’s all of our shopping trip on the dinghy dock! Again, we managed to tetris all of this shit into the dinghy with 3 people…

The boat swallowed all of that stuff as well and it’s like we never bought anything!  Now, *finding* all of the stuff that we want is going to be a giant pain because there’s no order to it and we didn’t think to inventory all of it when we put it in.  We’re going to regret that later, but hey, it’s our first cruising season! 😉

I also realized that I need to drink more water so in an effort to remember my water bottle, I bought some fun colored caps and put a Florida Freedivers sticker on it. It’s working so far!

After our big costco run we realized that costco didn’t actually have everything we needed. So in a completely unsurprising turn of events… we had to finish up our trip by hitting Aldi, Publix, and Winn Dixie to finish it off! Since this is our first season cruising and our first time provisioning a boat we have no idea what’s going on… how much food we need, what to buy, what we’ll end up eating.  It’s going to be quite the learning experience this year! I hope we got enough food!  The dehydrated food I get for the cats is out of stock pretty much everywhere, so they’re going to hopefully just end up eating fish!

One fun thing about boats that we hadn’t considered is that the freezer doesn’t defrost itself.  Apparently about once a month you have to empty the entire thing out, hit it with a heat gun to melt the ice, and then put everything back in it.  Since we hadn’t filled it up yet, we decided to do it now.

So our friend Caroline has a job at a fancy shrimp farm where they breed custom shrimp to supply companies with breeding stock for food or bait or whatever else.  When they send the best shrimp out at the end of a cycle the reject shrimp get sent home!  Caroline (luckily for us) doesn’t eat shrimp, but she grabbed 2 huge bags full of gigantic, hulk-sized shrimp for us! I cant wait to grill them up!

We had a fantastic time spending a week out here in Fort Pierce hanging out with our friends and relaxing.  Now it’s time to fire up the engine once again and head a little further south so we can hopefully make it to the Bahamas by my birthday! 🙂