For about one year I worked for a tug boat company as a deck hand. One of my responsibilities was that I had to make dinner whenever the ship would be out to sea. Usually the longest we would be at sea was 4 days but occassionally we would be out for up to 10 days at a time. The tug boat that I worked on was a “supply ship” style of tugboat which meant it was bigger than usual tugboats. It could carry 9 crew along with the Captain, First Mate and Engineer for a total of 13 crew. The one I was on only carried 2 deckhands, Captain, First Mate and the Engineer. On my first day I was asked about if I wanted to cook and I said yes because along with actually enjoying cooking I knew that I would get out of a lot of dirty jobs if I was the cook! The gally in the boat was amazing! There were 2 walk in freezers and 2 walk in refridgerators along with one normal refridgerator and freezer. There was every possible cooking tool and utensil imaginable along with lots of cook books. Nobody but me wanted to cook! Along with making dinner I always volunteered to make breakfast and lunch and would try to make what each person asked. By doing this the crew would not let me be transferred to another boat! Another thing that I did while we would be away at sea was that everyday would be somebody’s “day”. That person got to pick whatever they wanted. I couldn’t believe how some of the very, very experienced crew turned into little boys when they got to pick what they wanted. Since I had so much time on my hands I made everything from scratch! I also made sure that there was always too much so that there would be leftovers and in the year that I worked there I never had any problems with any of the crew. I was always in charge of purchasing all of the food for the trips and was told on the first day by the Captain to always buy the best of everything! Nothing economy. The tugboat was actually being used by the Tesoro oil company so they paid for all of the food. Because of that job I really enjoy cooking now and often buy different cook books and enjoy going into kitchen and cooking stores. I hope to some day have a real nice kitchen but it will be very hard to beat the one I had on the tugboat.