Sardines are a perfect food. They are easy to catch, low in the food chain bioaccumulationaly speaking, and live everywhere. They *can* be caught easily and with minimal waste, or you can find them canned in nice oil or sauce in any tienda. I have a lot of stories that center around sardines.

My first positive sardine memory is during planning school. Our studio project, a greening plan for a section of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, was doing our final presentation during a full on community board meeting. I was supposed to do the speaking part for my section, and I was nervous before the talk. My classmate Anthony Gelber, who was a little older than me and knew some stuff, pulled me aside to run through the talk one last time.

From a deli bag he retrieves a carton of OJ, a loaf of Italian bread, and a can of sardines in tomato sauce. I´m running through my note cards, and hes listening and pouring out cups of OJ, scooping out the center of the bread and layering in the sardines. He hands me a sardine sandwich with sauce all over, which forces me to put down my cards and run through the talk on memory, with sauce all over.

This story gives me so much nostalgia – for the camaraderie of school in the city, for the Bronx, for bodega meals. Also for the practice of balancing expertise with real communication (asking, listening, not just talking), being and sometimes staying nervous, and trying things for the first time. Over a decade later, living a very different life, I find daily use for all of this training.

A few nights back a friend broke out a cast net, and we applied it – with the help of a local who had the rather tricky deployment of a cast net on lock – to the roving schools of sardines that thread around the docks. In a few moments we had more than we could possibly eat, and we fried up batch after batch, stuffing our bellies and looking for more people to feed.

So maybe I am elevating the sardine a bit. Maybe this is a more general post about how sharing a meal builds community. Maybe its an even more general post about seeing abundance where it is. Pretty sure this one is not that deep. I just woke up thinking of my next meal, which F can attest is a pretty regular day.

This week, via The Week: “The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will increase threefold to 1,124 million tons over the next 34 years…if plastic consumption and production continues at current rates, the world’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish in terms of weight by 2050.”
We have been grappling recently with provisioning and how we can develop a pantry without disposable plastic. At sea, if you have a plastic waste hoard that needs tossing, you are faced with using your own two hands to pitch it right into the sea. Even though much of our land-based waste gets to the sea one way or another, there is something about this liveaboard scenario that evokes real personal responsibility.

For you, dear reader, a few questions: How is it not possible to buy food without buying plastic as well? How is it so that this mandatory plastic cannot be *really* recycled in my town? Not every town is so, but in many US towns this is still true. And, *drumroll* who/what absorbs these externalized impacts?

Take that one to church, y’all!

This day in sailing history, we assembled a fleet of pizzas, convened our motley crew of New England friends and family, and threw ourselves a going away party in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

At this time we were just starting to develop what would become our most valuable form of social currency: homemade pizza. A sailor’s budget is restrictive, especially if you are on land. The normal ways that people communicate friendship – exchanging gifts, picking up a tab, etc. – are a bit out of our grasp (at least on a regular basis). Compound that with the fact that as travelers, we are destined to be the new kids on the block again and again, and it seemed at first we would be spending a lot of time by ourselves.

At least until we fully understood the power of Pizzas As Far as the Eye Can See.