We dine like gods out here!
To give you an idea, I offer for your consideration this typical evening “crew ration”
Stuffed peppers, avocado, fresh tomato salad and hand-made garlic bread… All par for the course for our dining experience (trust me, were you here you would not dare to dishonor the glory of our consumption rituals by addressing them as “meals” either). Any fool who told you that people lose weight on long voyages was either a liar or someone who did not give proper respect to the culinary creation process. Translation: they did not have a duty cook, which is one of the major advantages of having more than 2 people on your boat.
In this sailor’s opinion, Allan probably made the best call of his ship captaining career when he took our advice of assigning a duty cook. He actually did it cunningly well. We have 2 duty rotations each 12 hours in length: Day watch and night watch. During night watch, each of us stands a 3 hour and during the day watch, three of us stand a 4 hour shift and the 4th person’s sole responsibility for the day is to make sure the rest of us eat meals that would make Bacchus envious. Tiffany and Alison typically take this burden on and they have done a fantastic job. The reason for this is that Allan and I have both stated that Ramen noodles and a can of coke every night sounds like a fun experiment. Alison agreed with this idea, however her idea of Ramen noodles is a travesty of college gourmet cooking.
Back to the duty cook thing. The real advantage here is that the cook easily spends 4 hours (the length of a watch) preparing lunch and dinner. Everyone realizes this, so none of the other watchstanders feel like the cook is shirking duty. Also, because the cook doesn’t have to worry about a watch during the day, they can spend a lot of time creating excellent meals, despite having to deal with problems straight out of Das Boat:
Also, this way no one gets overworked between standing watches and preparing meals.
The cooks almost got a fresh sushi reprieve when we landed our first fish of the trip until we realized it wasn’t a good “eating” fish (what the heck else are fish good for!?)
– Greg
