Confessions of a Bering Sea Cook – chapter 1

Confessions of a Bering Sea Cook – chapter 1

By Tim Dempsey

       Back in the 90s I took a job on a small coastal freighter for a seafood company in Seattle. I wanted a deckhand job and I wanted to work in the infamous Bering Sea but this was the only open position at the time so I took it thinking it would lead to a deck job. When they asked if I could cook, I assured them that I could and had loads of experience but basically, I had zero. When they confirmed that I was hired, the full weight of the decision started to sink in. I had to cook 3 meals a day for 8 guys, seven days a week, and I had to do order enough food in advance for a 60-day trip. This meant freezing milk and bread, and buying lots of fresh veggies that were durable and could keep like cabbage and potatoes. The port steward gave me a tour of the galley including the walk-in freezer and refer and said, “Remember, never call it sauce – Call it gravy. These guys won’t eat it if you call it sauce. Also, don’t use too much spice. All these guys have guts that are burned out from booze and they don’t like spice.”

As part of the provisioning process, I received two pallets of old stores from the cold storage. One was filled with weird cuts of freezer burned beef, boxes and boxes of pork chops, and a bunch of boxes labled “Tyson 8-cut Chicken”. The other pallet was comprised of boxes of frozen donuts. I was told that this is what was left over from the previous trip and that I needed to use it up before ordering more which turned into a lecture on being a frugal boat cook. It was clear that the port steward was getting some kind of bonus if he came in under budget. Soon after, I met the captain. He was suspicious of me and didn’t like the fact that he didn’t know me or my reputation and asked me to write down a thirty-day menu and present it to him prior to leaving. This was a kind of test I believe to see if I had rudimentary organizational skills to be completed while he could still kick me off the boat. I realize that I passed when he told me that we were leaving for the day for sea trials and as soon as the sun goes down, “dump all the fucking freezer burned meat over the side and order fresh meat.”

Not long after, I met the previous cook. He was nervious and chatty and he punctuated each of sentences with a nervous laugh that didn’t sound unlike “Flipper” trying warn Ranger Rick about a tiger shark in the lagoon. The laugh was unfluctuating coming after almost everything he said regardless of what he was talking about. This was the guy who I was replacing. He had received a lateral promotion to assistant engineer. He was overflowing with unsolicited advice about cooking and the galley and I instantly found him irritating. He tried really hard to get people to call him “coach” which I thought was weird because life experience as a guy has taught me that it’s generally a bad idea to assign yourself a nickname. It’s supposed to be assigned to you and usually signifies acceptance into the pack. Trying to admit yourself into the pack by assigning yourself a nickname is a breach of protocol and as a result, people rarely called him by his preferred name and instead called him “Roach” or “Couch” or “Flipper.

Then I met my bunkmate. He was a big Samoan deckhand named Ben who informed me that he didn’t care what the hell I cooked as long as there was some rice in the steamer. He also told me that I didn’t have to listen to anything “Roach” tells me – that he was a “punkass bitch.” That’s when I recalled a conversation that I had with Ben’s wife who worked in the office and was actually the person that hired me. She mentioned to me while she was sorting my new-hire paperwork that her husband worked on the same boat that I would be cooking on. She said she tries to make sure that he never gets any time off because when he gets more than a few days on land, he invariably gets drunk and ends up in jail for assault. So, I had that going for me. Ben asked me if I liked “slow jams” as he started securing his ghetto blaster to the head of his bunk along with his portable vcr/tv with several bungie cords. “Sure!”, I said, trying to sound positive and hoping to get off on the right foot. He dimed the volume and hit play and the smooth sounds of Kenny G’s soprano sax began blasting and reverberating down the passageway in what was becoming a long succession of surreal moments that weren’t going to end anytime soon.