What to eat when seasick on a sailing trip

Someone on board gets seasick on most sailing trips — new crew especially — and the wrong food can turn a queasy stomach into a ruined day. The right food, eaten at the right time, actually helps. Here is what to pack and what to leave ashore.

Eat something small before you feel it, not after

An empty stomach makes seasickness worse, not better — nausea on top of nothing to settle it is harder to recover from than nausea on a light meal. Eat something plain an hour or so before casting off and keep nibbling small amounts through a rough passage rather than skipping meals and hoping it passes; a stomach that is completely empty has nothing to anchor the queasiness.

What actually helps

• •Plain crackers, dry biscuits or crispbread — bland, low-fat, easy to nibble on even when nothing else sounds appealing.
• •Ginger in any form — ginger biscuits, crystallised ginger, ginger tea or ginger ale — is one of the few remedies with real evidence behind it.
• •Flat, non-fizzy drinks sipped slowly — plain water or diluted squash; small, frequent sips work better than one large glass.
• •Plain bread or toast, bananas, and apples — easy to digest and unlikely to make things worse coming back up.

What makes it worse

• •Greasy, fried or heavily spiced food — hard to digest at the best of times, worse on a moving boat.
• •Strong smells from the galley — frying bacon or chopping onions below deck can tip someone from queasy to actively sick; cook simply and ventilate when anyone aboard is sensitive.
• •Alcohol and very sugary or caffeinated drinks — all three can make nausea and dehydration worse rather than better.
• •Reading, phone screens or any close-up task below deck — not a food issue, but it undoes any good the food is doing; eating in the cockpit facing the horizon beats eating in the cabin.

Feed the rest of the crew without making it worse

One seasick person does not mean the whole galley shuts down — but cook upwind, keep the companionway open for ventilation, and favour meals that do not fill the cabin with strong smells: cold plates, sandwiches and anything that was prepped ashore rather than fried on board. Save the ambitious one-pot dinner for a calmer day.

Pack for it before you leave the dock

Ginger biscuits, plain crackers and flat water do not help if they are buried under the fresh produce in a cool box nobody wants to dig through mid-swell. Keep a small, separate stash somewhere easy to reach from the cockpit, and tell new crew where it is before you leave — by the time someone feels seasick, they will not want to go looking for it.