Confessions of a Bering Sea Cook – Chapter 2 by Tim Dempsey

Confessions of a Bering Sea Cook – Chapter 2

By Tim Dempsey

     Cooking is miserable on a boat in the Bering Sea. On my boat cooking was only half the job. You still worked on deck, you still did cargo, you still did wheel watches but in addition to that, you had to cook. It was an extraordinarily raw deal. The only upside is that if you were okay at cooking and could pull your weight everywhere else, you earned respect quickly.  My goal was to earn the respect and use it to transition to a deck job as quickly as possible. But that was months away and my immediate task was to get through this 60-day trip. The first couple of days on the boat, everybody is sniffing each others’ asses like dogs and logging any quirks, especially unpleasant ones, of their shipmates.  If there was somebody that was irritating to you now, after several weeks of close quarters, hard work, and pressure, you will likely hate their guts. It was a bit like jail in some ways. The staterooms are shared and are about the size of a jail cell, everybody eats communally in the galley, everybody toils away bitching about whoever wasn’t in earshot to whoever else that would listen and Roach’s dolphin-like cackle could be heard constantly in the background. Then, for me, there was this constant grinding pressure of work that seemed to never end – cooking, doing dishes, mopping, painting, doing cargo, moving lines in and taking lines out, chipping ice, carrying five gallon buckets of fresh lube oil down to the engine room, taking a wheelhouse watch at 4am, and then repeating it all the next day.

The king crab fishery is a winter fishery in January. By the time you get to the fishing grounds, you are pretty far west and a fair amount north. So north in fact, that there is limited daylight and even during midday the light is more like late afternoon and doesn’t last that long. The rest of the time, it’s straight up dark, seemingly always.  Then there is persistently stormy weather. The Bering Sea really is just a raceway for bad weather systems, as soon as one moves out, the next moves in. We were always either tracking a storm or in a storm. Every so often you would get a little break, maybe 2-3 days, and then you would start getting pounded again with swells and waves that looked like liquid mountains on a really bad day and could toss you against a bulkhead and throw you out of bed if you weren’t careful. This made attempting to cook a meal an act of futility until you start coming up with systems to handle each cooking situation. You could not take anything for granted and I learned this the hard way on one particularly bad night.

We had been getting tossed hard in a storm that had lasted 2 days at this point. Nobody was working because it was too bad outside so instead, they were all sitting in the galley watching “Lethal Weapon III”. I started dinner.  It was really cold outside.  You could hear wind chill warnings from the coast guard on the radio looping every 15 minutes. “exposed flesh can freeze in 3 minutes.”  It was cold in the galley too. I had placed 2 gallons of milk on some non-skid mat on the counter to thaw out and it had been over 24 hours and the milk still hadn’t thawed completely yet. I was amazed that the milk hadn’t really moved much despite the fact that the boat had been rolling hard for days. I had thrown a roast in the oven and tried to pin it to the inside corner of the oven with empty food cans. Even still, I could hear the roasting pans and the shim cans shifting from side to side in the oven with the motion of boat. Then on the stove, I have some potatoes and veggies cooking, also shimmed with cans pressed between the pans and the stove rails. Still, water would occasionally splash over the side and sizzle on the burners.  Overall, it seemed pretty much in control when suddenly we got hit with a one-two punch of waves and swells and boat shuddered and rolled really hard over. Magazines, cups, and ashtrays slid off the galley table while the guys grabbed the table so as not to slide off their chairs. I looked over at the two gallons of milk just in time to see them fly off the counter and explode on the floor. Then the boat, recovering, rolled hard the other direction and a tidal wave of milk went sloshing all the way across the floor to the opposite bulkhead.  The lids fell off the pots on the stove and boiling water and peas were spilling out on the stove and then running off the edge onto the floor.  Again, the boat rolled back still shuddering, and this time, the latch on the oven door released and the door flew open and the roasting pan and roast flew out of the oven and onto the floor dumping grease and the roast into the sea of milk that kept sloshing from one side to the next.  I grabbed a fork and chased the roast that was surfing across the floor slipping in the greasy milk and fell on my ass but I got it back in the pan. Then I went for the mop which was in the pantry and tried to mop up the liquid mess as it continued to spread. After several minutes, I had the mess contained and took a breath and looked at the galley table and realized that the entire crew sat silently transfixed on me. Ten minutes later I cut up the roast and served it with remaining peas and potatoes and everybody ate it without saying a word.