by B.J. Porter (Contributing Editor)

By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, northern boaters have their boats entombed in shrink wrap and are bracing for the cold. But there are still parts of the country where you never put the boat away, and there are a lot of Americans out there cruising the world year round.

In our years cruising, we had our share of…unusual…Thanksgiving celebrations. Trying to hold on to the family traditions we’ve shared in places where you can’t find basic ingredients and you have an oven that’s too small to roast a modest-sized chicken can be quite a challenge!

An American Holiday?

An announcement came over the radio on the Grenada cruiser’s net one morning that had all the American boats chuckling. “The Tiki Bar would like to invite all our American friends for a Fourth of July celebration this week, with turkey and all the traditional trimmings.” They were so close, and so well-intentioned. Just off by a few months.

Thanksgiving as a concept is not unique to the United States. Canada has a similar holiday, and fall meals and festivals to appreciate the bounty of the harvest are in most cultures. But we Americans have our own way of doing it, with our turkey-centered meal and our history of pageantry, parades, and football games. In some countries, they understand our holiday traditions, but many don’t understand at all and it takes some explaining.

And recreating that experience on a boat? Well, you can get close if you want to plan ahead put in the work.

The Turkey Challenge

Getting a holiday turkey in the U.S. is easy. Cooking it on a boat…not so much. Very few boat ovens are large enough to roast one. And if you’re used to making all those sides, boat stoves will push the limits of your creativity with limited burners and pan space.

But if you’re set on spending your turkey day afloat, you can cook your turkey and sides in advance and reheat as needed and come up with a pretty passable spread. If you want to keep it easy, you can have an entire meal prepared from a restaurant to bring to the boat.

Turkeys abroad

Out of the U.S., the first challenge is getting your hands on an actual whole turkey. In places like New Zealand and Australia it’s not too hard, since whole turkey is often available in stores. While if they’re not in sizes we’re used to, that works in a boater’s favor. It’s much easier to cook a 4 kilogram (8.8 lb) turkey on a boat than it is a twenty-pounder like you’d find in the U.S.!

Other places, you’ll be doing well if you can find a prepared, frozen turkey breast entrée in a market. You often have language barriers, even trying to order one, and there just aren’t a lot of whole turkeys around in Fiji or Dominica. A whole bird is nearly impossible or very expensive if you can find a butcher to order one.

The ingredient dilemma

The other big “traditional thanksgiving” challenge was the lack of standard ingredients you might easily put your hands on in a domestic grocery store. Not every country has fried onions or cream of mushroom soup for that green bean casserole, and “pumpkin” has a very different meaning in other countries. And doesn’t come in cans sized to make one pie with a convenient recipe on the back. And good luck finding cranberry sauce.

Some foreign specialty gourmet stores carry U.S. brands and products; there’s a reason we horded canned pumpkin in July when we found it at a shop outside of Sydney. That one treasure trove kept us in proper pumpkin pie through more than one Thanksgiving and Christmas!

Another challenge was our family sausage dressing recipe. It calls for a certain brand of poultry seasoning and a specific type of sausage. Neither of these were available anywhere outside the U.S..

The answer? Most of the time it was copycat recipes. The internet has loads of them to replicate specific the tastes and textures of commercially available products. Most were close enough, and it was different every year. Though our results were not as predictable as the recipe my great-grandfather handed down to us and didn’t taste quite perfect, they were still passable.

Cooking the bird

In our years cruising I explored ways to cook the turkeys we found. I’ve tried quartering and pan roasting, spatchcocking, grilling on the back of the boat, and “oven roasting” them in a closed, low-heated boat barbecue. I got pretty good at the last technique with a grill we bought in Australia. It had a deep enough lid that I could fit a tiny turkey inside, with one burner off and a pan of water underneath it to buffer the heat. It was a puzzle that took many tries to solve, and the results were sometimes better than others.

With small ovens, don’t be shy about cutting up the bird to cook in pieces, or even try grilling it.

Enjoying the Cultural Blend

One of our favorite Thanksgiving experiences was our first holiday in New Zealand. The Opua Cruising Club adopted a celebration with American cruisers and turned it into a local holiday for everyone. They put on a Thanksgiving meal and invited cruising boats from every country, with a pot-luck dessert and local talent and musical entertainment for the crowd. It was a welcoming, warm experience for our family, who’d arrived only a few days earlier after a grueling sixteen-day passage and did not know where to even find a grocery store yet.

We’ve done potluck Thanksgiving dinners on the beach, dinners in marina restaurants and clubs, dinners in American themed restaurants and bars, quiet dinners with just our family, and a few very nice gatherings with other boats.

Your Boating Thanksgiving

Whether you’re in Florida, California, on a charter in the Caribbean or a cruising boat in the South Pacific, or you just get a weird break in the weather up north, you can make your own Thanksgiving traditions! Bring friends on board, mix in some local dishes, and plan so you can make it all work in the constraints of your galley.

There’s always a way. So have a delightful holiday!