To serve at Sea

Cooking up a nice little dish is almost always quite fun, add a little spice here and fry a couple of mushrooms there. But being in this boat’s “kitchen”, means more than just making a stew. Not to talk about all the cleaning, you have to quickly and efficiently be able to serve 43 pupils, about 15 at a time. They all want food and when they get it, you can bet your ass that most of them will want a refill. After all, most people get hungry after 4 hours work, and to be honest, you´re almost always hungry.

On this particular day, there was another bothering factor. You see, the waves were just getting bigger and bigger. I have the shift between 12-4, so my first job is to serve lunch to the people getting of their shift. Which in the end, got pretty messy. Hungry people, big waves, and a small room is seldom a good combination, and I speak from experience.

After getting that spectacle done, it was time to get all the dirty dishes out of the way. Our first cook had made us a kind of wok, only with all the ingredients prepared separately. The food was good, but it left us with a lot of dishes. Cleaning the dining room was part of the procedure as well, and as you can probably understand by now, it was a bit of a hassle. All of this done under severe rocking, constantly waging back and forth. And since the floor was wet, the only way to prevent sliding from one side of the room to the other, as soon as you let go of your steadfast, was to put salt all over the place.

By the time we were done with the dishes, the clock was almost 3 pm. Which meant it was time for “fika”, a kind of Swedish meal between the meals. But since the waves had reached a height of nearly 6 meters, we couldn´t set the table in advance. All the plates would just get knocked over. Instead, we had to act on orders from the “guests”. What they wanted on their sandwich, how many plates they needed and so on and so forth. It was a little stressful, but worked quite fine. After doing the dishes this time too, my shift was done. Which meant I had a quarter free time before the lessons started. But I don´t think you want to hear about that, so I’ll end it were the fun ends. Have a good day, and greetings from:

Jonathan Kjelvik, Starboard