Location: Radford, Virginia
When we were living on our sailboat, Rachel, in the
San Blas Islands off Panama's northern coast, the arrival of the
"veggie boat" was a very big deal. Open fishing boats
about 20 feet long, they did double duty as floating grocery stores
and provided us with the necessities of life - like vegetables,
chicken, and occasionally wine - all for very reasonable prices. A
few of the islands had "grocery stores", but these were not
always convenient or well stocked. The veggie boats, also not always
well stocked, would make their seemingly random rounds of random
anchorages on some random schedule that none of us cruisers could
ever figure out.
We always had a shopping list prepared
on the off chance that today would be veggie boat day. After being
there a few months, we came to the realization that our list was
actually not so much a shopping list as it was a wish list.
A
shopping list, at least to us, implies that one will go to a store
and buy what's on the list. In the San Blas, however, one "goes
shopping" and buys whatever the veggie boat has on board. You
may not really want bananas or cabbage or "pollo entera"
(chicken, plucked, with head and feet still attached) but when that's
all there is, that's what you buy, whether it's on the list or not.
Needless to say, mealtimes often required a certain amount of
creativity.
And there was always the awareness
that, if we bought more than we needed, someone else further down the
line might not be able to get what they needed. We were all in the
same boat, so to speak, and were very aware of that fact. That being
said, however, your chances of getting what you wanted were directly
proportional to your position in the fleet - distinctly better if you
were among the first boats visited rather than among the last.
We've found that, to some degree, going
to the grocery store these days is a bit like shopping from the
veggie boat. We never know what we'll find or what will be out of
stock (other than hand sanitizer and toilet paper, of course).
Obviously, the range of options is much broader here at home than in
the San Blas, but all the same, we are grateful for our "wish list" mentality and the lessons we learned shopping "veggie
boat style".
Please keep others in mind, buy only
what you need, and may your veggie boat always come in,
Mark & Julie
