First day on the Sea Lion
Yesterday was my first day on the Sea Lion here in the Sea of Cortez. My first day on the boat was a pretty good day. I got onto the boat at 8:30 and went straight to work in the Galley, the kitchen is bigger than my last one by quite a bit and very well stocked with every tool a cook would need. That was a relief. The food is pretty crazy, I’m definitely not used to this style of cooking, so it’s going to take some time for me to adapt. Basically, I will get up in the morning at 5:27 and make a 3 minute commute to the kitchen up a flight of stairs, then from there start bread and begin to work on breakfast. After the bread is started the breakfast buffet is set up and put out by 7:30. From there I have to do all of the prep for lunch, a staff lunch at 11:30 and a guest lunch at 12:30 as well as work on the bread some more and help do prep for dinner. After that it’s time to start prep for dinner and then bake off the bread for the night. Dinner is served at 7:30 and all kitchen staff helps with plating and to get the food out in an orderly fashion. Dinner is the only meal that is not buffet style. There is typically 25 staff and 70 guests to feed at each seating. Tomorrow is an outdoors Barbeque on the beach type of thing, but I’m not quite sure how that works. More on that tomorrow.
As far as my co-workers go, it’s an interesting lot. 60% female and 40% male, the ratio is a bit higher than I thought it would be. There are two classes of employee’s on board now. The full time employee (which I am) works 8 weeks on and 4 weeks off and the contract employee works for 6 months straight. At this point in time the full time employee’s are about to rotate off the boat, so they have been on board for 7 weeks now and you can tell they are a bit frazzled. Every one so far has been very nice, I don’t see any problems forming at this point for me personality wise. That may change next week when the next rotation arrives, but I hear good things about all of them as well.
My first nights sleep was completely horrible! I had so much trouble sleeping, it sucked. I blame it on too much coffee, too much nerves and adapting to sleeping on a noisy rocking boat. It’s going to take a bit to get used to always being in motion, but I know that I will. Luckily I haven’t had a problem with sea sickness, this was a concern. I think I’ll be ok, we have good windows in the Galley and that helps.
I’m a little beaten down at this point, but I’ll get used to it for sure. A good nights sleep will make things much better.
I’ve got internet on the boat now, but it’s slow, expensive and uploading pictures is not feasible, so when I get into town I’ll stop at an internet cafe and put a bunch of pics in my photo book.
