Today was calmer but we were still going about 6 knots. I like it when I get up at my usual time but breakfast is easy like cold cereal and oatmeal and I hang out on deck with the 4 to 8 watch, that was always my favorite, I love mornings. The royal sail is still being worked on, Tenley, Brooke and Laura still stitching away, Matt is working on mast wedges and some Dutchmen and some foot ropes are being served. Everything is settling in nicely.
Yesterday and today Robin has commented on my cooking. He’s impressed with how well I’m doing, knowing that I might not have been fully prepared for the position and never cooked this long for this many people. He also said that it wouldn’t have surprised him if we had cold cereal for dinner last night because we were being jostled around so much by the sea.
In the afternoon we also talked a bit about snacks for the crew, underway working 12 hours a day and specially night watches works up an appetite. Usually there is always peanut butter and jelly of some sorts out and leftovers for them to snack on, but you really have to have something quick because you’re running from one watch position to the next. There is an idle on watch, if your not doing chores, handling lines or pumping bilges then your doing some navigation, checking the weather and studying the stars. Even basic things like potatoes or rice would be good to grab, but also bread and some kind of cookie, the way to do that without me spending time on it would to have the 12 to 4 watch do it. We’d talked to before about the watch making bread, I did that last year, but I have a lot of bread that I don’t want to go bad, but I guess it’s time they start making it for snack time, or some other dessert.
Right after the 12-4 got stood down Brooke check on the fishing line trailing off the stern and there was fish on the end of it! Grant hauled it in and everyone was called on deck, it was a small mahi, it had already lost a lot of it’s colour so it must have been dragging for awhile. Baron whips out his filet knife and goes to down on it, grabs the guts and then chucks them overboard. We didn’t get a bucket of water fast enough to wash away the blood so it started to congeal and Matt helped scrub it off.
We got two nicely cut fillets and they were handed over to me, dipped in a little flour, fried in butter and a sprinkle of lemon juice. Everyone got a small chunk to go with dinner.
But making dinner was a whole other story. We were rocking and rolling really well by 4 o’clock and trying to fry fish, check on my chicken and potatoes that were the original planned dinner was hard. I pulled open the oven door, and of coarse my glasses get steamy so I wait a minute, but we bounce and the oven door swings half way closed again. I have the racks in the oven turned around so that the lip faces out instead of at the back, this way incase the bow is dropping into the waves and I open the door things won’t fly out at me, but then it makes it hard to pull the rack out, the pan wants to stay in place.
At this rate not only is the stove pretty wet, but also the floor and I’m slipping all over the place. At least we’re healing to port so I can lean against the counter. Jesse says it’ll only get worse.
