Funchal Boat Cruise Food and Drinks Aboard

What the ticket covers, and what it does not

Food and beverages are on the exclusion list. Nothing edible comes with the booking, and the operator says so plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered at sea. What the ticket does cover is the sailing itself, the crew, the shore spotters and unlimited access to every part of the vessel.

The onboard bars appear in the inclusions, which reads oddly next to food and drinks appearing in the exclusions. The two statements resolve neatly once you see what each is describing. The bars are part of the boat and you are free to use them; what you take from them is a separate matter from the booking.

That is a clearer arrangement than it might sound. You are not rationing something you brought from a supermarket and you are not stuck for three hours with nothing available. There is a bar, it is open, and using it is your choice rather than a line already settled when you booked.

Drinks and snacks, not a meal

What is available is described as a selection of drinks and snacks. That is the right scale for a three hour wildlife sailing, which does not carry a galley turning out plates and would be a worse trip if it did.

So plan the day around it accordingly. Eat properly before you sail or after you land, and treat what is on board as something to keep you comfortable rather than as lunch. Bring a card, since a small bar on a moving boat is not the place to assume anything about payment methods.

The timing usually helps. A morning sailing puts you back on the waterfront in the middle of the day, which is precisely when Funchal's restaurants are at their best and least rushed.

Diets that cannot be accommodated

Allergy, coeliac and vegan requirements cannot be catered for on this sailing, and the honest version is better than a vague reassurance. A small boat working three hour trips has no separate preparation space and no way to guarantee what a serious allergy genuinely needs.

If any of that applies to you, the answer is straightforward. Bring what you need. Nobody is going to object to a passenger with their own snack, and it removes an unknown from a morning where you would rather be watching the water than reading a label.

It is also worth saying that this is a limitation of the format rather than an unwillingness. The same constraint applies on most small vessels running short trips, and an operator claiming otherwise would be the one worth worrying about.

Water, sun and the thing people underestimate

Sitting on an open deck in Atlantic sunlight with a breeze across you is deceptively dehydrating. The wind evaporates sweat before you notice it, the sun is stronger over water because of the reflection, and the temperature feels mild the whole time.

The result is people who step off after three hours with a headache they blame on the boat's motion. Some of it usually was not motion. Drinking steadily from early in the trip is the simplest possible fix and it takes no planning at all.

In high summer, consider carrying extra water of your own alongside whatever you take from the bar. Madeira's climate is famously even, but a July deck in full sun is still a July deck in full sun.

Eating before you sail

Something is better than nothing, and something light is better than something heavy. An empty stomach makes almost everybody more susceptible to motion, and a large fried breakfast an hour before departure is the other end of the same mistake.

Bread, fruit, a coffee if that is your habit. Enough to have something to work with, not enough to feel it when the boat starts moving. If you know you are prone to seasickness, take whatever remedy you use well before departure rather than at the first swell, because most of them need time to work.

Funchal makes this easy. The cafes near the waterfront open early and serve the sort of thing you want before a boat, and you can eat within a few minutes' walk of where the catamaran leaves from.

Eating after you land

This is where the geography pays off. The trip returns to the Funchal waterfront in the centre of the city, and you step off into one of the better places in Madeira to be hungry with a free afternoon ahead of you.

The old town's restaurant streets are a short walk east along the seafront. The Mercado dos Lavradores, the covered market with the fruit and fish halls, is a few minutes inland from there. Both are close enough that you can decide while you are walking rather than planning in advance.

Madeira's own food is worth seeking out rather than defaulting to the safe option. The island has a specific cuisine built on what grows on volcanic slopes and what comes out of very deep water, and after a morning spent on that water it makes a certain amount of sense.

Rubbish and the ocean

Whatever you bring aboard comes back with you or goes in the boat's own bin. On a vessel that runs eco-certified wildlife trips this is not decoration, it is the basic condition of doing the work at all.

Plastic in the Atlantic ends up inside the animals everyone came out to see. Turtles take floating bags for jellyfish and the ones that survive it are the lucky ones. A wrapper that goes over the side on a boat like this is a genuinely poor way to repay the morning.

A refillable bottle solves most of it before it starts. It travels well, it is what you want on the deck anyway, and it means one less thing on board that could end up in the water.

Before you book