Working in the galley

In this moment right now, I know that tomorrow will be an extremely difficult day… not only because of the hot weather or the many other tasks I have to do every day. No, because tomorrow, I only have one big task: I must cook for 50 hungry people with just three other nice guys.

This will be my fourth galley duty on this trip, and I hope that tomorrow will be the funniest one for me, because I hopefully will not be seasick like the first times. Cooking for 50 people is a really hard task but it can also be fun, especially with nice loud music, our favorite music is sea shanties which are in the playlist of our boatswain Henry. Yet even with loud music, this job is annoying when you are seasick.

Today, the exclusive pool on the Thor Heyerdahl opened. Sadly, I could not chill in the pool for a long time in the evening because I had to get enough sleep for my galley duty that started in the early morning. That is one of the disadvantages connected to this job.

For breakfast, we served bread, cheese, bacon, jam and cereal – as always. This is not that difficult to prepare, but you have to wake up at 5:30 am. Unfortunately, we do not have a dishwasher on board, so after breakfast, three of the four people went cleaning the dishes for a really long time. My tip with the dishes is to not put a full box of dishes on the kitchen table, even when there is a non-slipping mat below. Sometimes, it is not enough for the big waves on the stormy Atlantic Ocean. During my galley duty, one box with dishes fell down and created a disaster. Haters could say that it was predictable, and this is maybe correct.

For lunch, we prepared bread cheese, bacon, salad, and some dips. Who knows what we did after lunch? Correct, again dishes!

Dinner is nowadays the only warm meal of the day and therefore, there is a lot of work to do, especially when you have to cut many vegetables. We made a tasty lasagne, and luckily, it was enough for the whole crew on our ship. However, our job in the galley was not done yet…we had to do the dishes AGAIN!!! We spend the rest of the day cleaning up the kitchen till 21 pm. We always have to clean all the used items, all surfaces as well as the floor.

Many of us on board love to eat fish. Therefore, we have fished since leaving Tenerife. A few days ago was our lucky day as we caught two big dolphinfish and one of them was 1.10 m long, a real monster! We killed each fish and gutted, skinned and prepared them on deck, so that our captain Detlef and our project lead Ruth could finish preparing the fish in the galley. The fish was really tasty, and it was crazy how good it tasted! However, since then, we have not had any luck with fishing.

All in all, galley duty is a very fun but also stressful and important job on this ship since every ship needs good food for a happy crew and atmosphere.