Off to sea

The past few weeks have been really intense and life changing. On July 6^thI got married. Twelve of our sailor friends from Bounty come and they camped out for a few days before and after, so the wedding wasn’t just one day, it was a week long event. People slowly found their way back home and things returned to normal on the little farm. Jesse and I have been living on land for the last year and a half; we knew we wanted to get back on boats some time in the fall, we just didn’t realize that for us fall start August 19^th.

Jesse was browsing ASTA’s billet bank and found that Sorlandet was looking for a cook. Sorlandet is a Norwegian tall ship who is being rented by a Canadian company called Class Afloat, they take Canadian high school students out to sea for a semester or two. I went to the Class Afloat website and read the requirements for cook and knowing that it was a big boat serving a lot of people I thought I didn’t have enough experience to be cook, so I applied for cook’s mate. I ended up calling John, a friend of mine from Bounty who is currently on Sorlandet as their first officer, he said I’m over qualified for the cook’s mate and that I’d do fine as the cook. A few days later Class Afloat called me and said they wanted me for the cook. We had a good chat about the job and exactly how many people I’d be cooking for, 20 pro crew and 40 student trainees.

I’m really excited for this new job and really nervous, I’ve never cooked for 60 people before, but the more I learn about Sorlandet and her amazing galley, the better I feel. Not only is everything relatively new and stainless steal it’s also computerized. I talked with the current cook who is a friend of mine, Jessica, she’s filling me in on all the fancy gadgets and Dina, another cook friend, is giving me advice for working with teens, she worked on another of Class Afloat boat, the Concordia, who sank in February 2010.