“Thank you for cooking”, “Thank you for the food”, “Oh, it already smells so good”.

These are some of the things I’ve had the joy of hearing for nearly two weeks in a row. It never tired me. In fact, these are remarks which keep me going, and which were one of the reasons I was excited about embarking on this journey. They were a reason to work hard using the small skill set I had, and a reason strong enough to withstand the doubts and fears I had built up in my mind in the weeks prior.

So, in short, here is how I ended up in this position on board the good ship Tres Hombres.

Last year I joined for the whole winter trip as trainee, which started December 1st. I figured then that it was going to be something like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a great adventure of learning about sailing, but also about visiting foreign countries and working with an international crew. And a little bit to figure out what would come next in my life.

Looking back, it was much more than that. The journey unsurprisingly ignited a love for sailing out onto the vast ocean, to be a part of the wild nature surrounding us every day and a longing to become a better sailor. But more unexpectedly, I found the joy of cooking in an ever moving kitchen, which we call the galley. What my Italian cookie Giulia taught me, each time I offered to help her or showed interest in her work, slowly added to this great adventure and everything I wished to learn from it.

When I got back home in April, I experimented in the kitchen there with what I’d learned, this time not in a rolling, moving environment where every unattended bowl or knife wants to fling itself across the room. I started to see ships cooking as a profession which I would consider in a few years time, after getting better at regular cooking. But as the summer was passing I realised that just cooking for me or a few people at home, with way less tools yet access to way more supermarket products, was not as delightful as what it felt like being in the galley.

That’s when the perfect opportunity landed in my mailbox; an email from fairtransport. They needed a cook for just 10 days of the summer trip, from Den Helder to Copenhagen. Without hesitation and as soon as possible I sent a reply, obviously saying yes. I would sign on somewhere near the end of August, so I made no other tight plans for the summer, because as always with this engineless sailing vessel anything can shift in the planned arrival date. But finally, the sign on date arrived, after having tracked the ship on a vessel finder site for a few weeks, and I could once again see this beauty of a ship and the people whom I’d met during my time as trainee. Still, I felt a certain pressure and fear for the responsibility I was going to bear, at least for 10 days. Luckily, the cook who would step off, Jeroen, helped me with provisioning and choosing the amounts of fresh products needed, as well as giving me a load of interesting recipes to try out on board. After a few days of provisioning, deep cleaning the galley, turning it into my temporary office and preparing food during the crew’s workdays, we sailed off to Copenhagen, with the feeling that the crew was already very trustworthy of my skills, even if I am just 19 years old now, much younger than most of them.

After arriving in Copenhagen on the 6th of September, I can safely say that some of the worries I had about this whole trip all faded as the days at sea passed. And maybe it was not perfectly varied between every meal, and maybe I could have made even tastier or more special stuff, but I’ll leave that for my fellow shipmates to decide.

After all that, I can safely say that I’ll love to join again to reign over the galley one day.

Lesen Sie gerne die Abenteuer unserer Crew? Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie wären dabei, wenn Sie unsere Produkte zu Hause genießen würden!