Back To Sea With Me: Northerly Cookin'

Last day at home and I'm packing up for the drive north. My boat leaves the dock around noon on Friday, so I'm driving up Thursday and staying at my "Seattle home" before checking in on Friday morning. A surprising email popped in yesterday from my Port Captain, letting me know that he needs me to play Cook on this next trip. I guess he had someone quit and since I'm the "new guy", guess what? I'm cookin'!

I don't mind cooking and I love to be in the kitchen/galley, but haven't had much experience cooking for a hungry crew of tug boaters. I've begun a list of things that I think will go over well, and that I know I can pull off successfully, which hopefully leads to a happy crew. The cook can get a great deal of praise, but can also get a great deal of grief if he/she isn't whipping out some good grub. I'll do my best to keep em happy and it'll be a learning experience for sure. One of the most intimating jobs of the cook, is to create the shopping list for when we pull into port, and executing a grocery run. On my last trip, our cook (usually accompanied by another crew member, but not always) made several grocery runs, dropping a few $k, bringing back a truck full of supplies for the next leg of the trip. If you forget something critical, or don't buy enough, you can make enemies real fast. Hopefully they'll go easy on me knowing that I'm kind of getting thrown into the fire here. If not, oh well... It's a job and I'm happy to have one.

The cook onboard basically just manages the galley underway and helps on deck when making and breaking tow, or when pulling into port. I'll also be helping with cargo operations as before unless I'm having to make a grocery run.

I also learned that I'll be doing 2, back-to-back Anchorage runs with maybe one week in between. These runs typically take about 3 weeks, so I'll theoretically get about 6 weeks of sea-time before going back to school in October.

The past month at home has been awesome. I was able to spend a great deal of time with my wife and kids and got a fair amount of down-time while chipping away at various house-hold projects. The 4 weeks went by fast, but I'm fairly certain that the sea-time will fly by as well.

I'll be blogging and sharing my stories from the galley onboard the "Manfred Nystrom" over the next few weeks. Stay tuned...