The Hungry Sailor

By Robert Kaminski

Within these pages, you, the unsalted nut that has chosen to go down to where land meets water and put to sea, will find the most critical secrets of survival at sea, galley duty, and how not to kill any sailors.

There are twenty-eight days at seas worth of salty culinary galley magic in these pages plus more. So settle in, boys and girls, you’ve signed on for the adventure of a lifetime, and if you’re reading this just before your first hitch at sea, it’s the beginning of your adventure. Congratulations and see ya around the harbor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662437403

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The Hungry Sailor

Robert Kaminski

Copyright © 2021 Robert Kaminski

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-3741-0 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-3740-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Bookmark

Crew Change Day

Day 1 in the Galley

Day 2 in the Galley

Day 3 in the Galley

Day 4 in the Galley

Day 5 in the Galley

Day 6 in the Galley

Day 7 in the Galley

Day 8 in the Galley

Day 9 in the Galley

Day 10 in the Galley

Day 11 in the Galley

Day 12 in the Galley

Day 13 in the Galley

Day 14 in the Galley

Coffee

Twenty Eight Day Hitch or Shanghai or Screwchange

The Four Faces of Screw Change:

Day 15 in the Galley

Day 16 in the Galley

Day 17 in the Galley

Day 18 in the Galley

Day 19 in the Galley

Day 20 in the Galley

Day 21 in the Galley

Day 22 in the Galley

Day 23 in the Galley

Day 24 in the Galley

Day 25 in the Galley

Day 26 in the Galley

Day 27 in the Galley

Day 28 in the Galley

A Sailor’s Life for You

Morning Rations

Noon Rats

The Back Watch Changes a Man

Mid Rats

Kreng Jai

The Condiment Conundrum

Afterthought

After, After Thoughts

This Is Knot the End!

The Mallet of Knowledge.

A hitch at sea’s worth of tested and requested meals, a sailor’s cookbook, and a survival guide for the new sailor who is of adventuresome spirit and goes down where land meets water and puts to sea. So gear up, lash it down, and tie it up, there are some unvarnished sea stories here, boys and girls! And call your ma! She worries, you know!

Author’s Note

Ahoy! And thanks for buying this book.

I sincerely hope you enjoy it and gain some galley skills because of it.

Now the first thing you need to do after reading this book, of course, is run out and go buy a real cookbook, a few of them, written by a real chef, with lots of pictures, step-by-step instructions, cook times, accurate measurements and temperatures, and all that. I suggest Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen confidential and medium raw books. These will keep you grounded as far as your visions of becoming a land cook and opening a restaurant. That is a tough gig. Stick to the sea, my friend, and go to Amazon for his food travel show. It’s very necessary for the sailor, trust me. Martha Stewart, that’s all I have to say. You believe and obey everything she says, and if you ever meet her, give her my number. Yup, you read that right.

Get a meat thermometer and learn the safe temps of all things you are going to be serving your shipmates and wash your dirty sailor hands—a lot. Better yet, get them black nitrate gloves from the chief engineer—they’re cool!

Seriously, thank you and enjoy.

Keep the radar up and the wheels down!

Prologue

I specifically wrote this book to help the new sailor, the first time on the boat, the captains courageous to be who gets thrown into galley duty because they fell into a trap their first day on the boat. Now I’m not talking shanghai here, but it’s almost as bad. It sounds like this, Can you cook? And there’s the trap. Making yourself breakfast or a sandwich is not cooking for several hungry sailors at sea. So be careful here and know your limitations. I’ve heard this trap slam shut on many a-cocky young sailor’s necks when their response is this, I am a wizard in the kitchen. Everyone loves my cooking, I make a mean— bang! The trap slam shut. Here’s the grub card. You got X amount of dollars to feed a crew of seven. We sail in four hours, and we’ll be gone fourteen to sixteen days. Call when you’re on your way back from the store, and this is a galley, not a kitchen Gilligan.

Now you’re alone in the galley, what’s your move sport?

Well, if you haven’t read this book yet, you’re fucked. But you’re in luck because I’m here for you, and I give a damn. Even more important, you hold in your hands a survival guide of sorts. If you know nothing else, when putting to sea for the first time, having some galley skills may buy you some time and alleviate some of your stress, so you can focus on getting your sea legs and mastering your other sailor skills. For the knowledge and skills you seek, volumes of it, libraries full of sea wisdom and sailor powers, are hidden. You don’t need a treasure map. It’s not in any book. It is sauntering around the deck of the vessel you’ve just signed on to. Yes, your new shipmates. You just need to figure out how you get a library card so you gain access to the books. This is not owed to you—it is earned by you. It’s a gift from old salt to new. Its tradition.

This salty thing of ours goes back thousands of years. Way back when it took some eight years to master your salty craft, from deck to sails to wheel. This is still true today. You must know how to make and break tow, lines, splice ’em and throw ’em, engine room, what a happy engine room looks, sounds, smells, and feels like—yeah, the vibrations. Any one of these things that is a bit off can be an early warning that something catastrophic is about to erupt, so pay attention and hone your situational awareness skills down to a level that may have gotten you drowned in early Salem, during the witch hunts become that sea sorcerer or witch. Know where to be and when you need to be there.

What you will learn at sea, you can’t fully master from books and classroom. It will come from the rolling deck and the salt spray on your face, my friend. But you will need some guidance, so be a good shipmate and you will find your sea rabbi. Most importantly, enjoy the ride because you are on an adventure of a lifetime, your lifetime. You are a sailor, and soon you will have sea stories to tell around the fireplace back home on a stormy night to your significant other. It was a stormy night just like this one. The watches had been doubled. All hatches and watertight, doors double-checked, seas were building, and we were eighteen hours ahead of the storm’s track, the chart table light flickered, and there I was, windswept and tattered, on the shores of Kuala Lumpur, surrounded by confused and angry monks.

As the fire crackles with a new log and more wine is poured as the storm rages outside, if you can arrange the lights flicker at that moment while your wide-eyed and hypnotized girl who is hanging on every word of her brave sailor’s sea story, it’s shaping to be a pretty good night, you savvy. Now all young sailors want those sea stories and they’re gonna get them; the sea has an amazing way of handing out stories, she has an infinite supply. I’ll promise you this, you will not keep the T-shirt after that show. Best get a tattoo to remind you when to stay on the safe side of the big bridges that gate the open water.

Okay, back to business. My wisdom, experience, guidance, and magic only goes so far. You must get bold in the galley. You have an awesome opportunity to put some really creative, not to mention expensive, culinary tools in your galley toolbox, and you have a captive audience upon which to experiment on. Just don’t go Dr. Frankenstein and kill any of them. Remember rule number one.

Now everything in this book is true and a work of nonfiction—unless it gets me or anyone else in trouble, then it’s a work of fiction and totally made up.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state that no animals, plants, or canned goods had their feelings hurt in any way, were discriminated against, gender labeled, made to cry, or denied a safe zone when they felt offended at any time during the research and writing of this book.

But an awful lot of them were eaten that’s for damn sure.

Let’s throw off the lines and