All Piss and Wind (14 page)

But before long the odd plastic bag began to appear beside the boat and we could hear the distant roar of aeroplanes taking off from Mascot. Civilisation. Past the familiar entrance to Botany Bay, under the dramatic bluffs of Maroubra. Hornby Light guided us into Sydney Harbour. Cruise over. Motoring quietly up the Western Channel at dusk, the Harbour Bridge and CBD suddenly burst into the striking coloured light show left over from the recent New Year's Eve celebrations. We'd returned to the twenty-first century with a bang. And Dal could now have all the baked beans he liked.

O
CEAN RACING IS NOT
a sport for gourmands or gastronomes. The drink is usually passable, but the food can be woeful beyond words. It wasn't so long ago that crews used to head for Hobart with little more than a huge hunk of corned beef wrapped in tea-towels, a bag of potatoes and onions, a large jar of jam or Golden Syrup, two pounds of butter and as many loaves of fresh bread as they could stuff into the one dependably dry locker on the boat. Standards have risen since those early days, but not much.

That old, tough culture of off-hand marine catering stretched well into the 1980s. I can remember helping to ready a maxi on Friday afternoon for one of the long overnight races then common in the offshore season. The owner was already loitering below with
that smug, self-satisfied look most skippers exude when they've managed to duck off early from their office and now anticipate an extended, robust sail and not getting home until late on Saturday evening. To be polite, I ventured a standard crew question: ‘What are we having for dinner, boss?'

‘Dinner? It's just an overnight race, mate. Didn't think we'd need to take any
food
. There's some chocolate bars in the galley. Won't that be enough?' (No doubt he'd come directly from a four-course corporate lunch, stuffed to the gunnels with tax-deductible food and wine.)

‘Well, skipper. There'll be about twenty of us going, and we'll be out there for at least fourteen hours. I reckon we'll have to eat
something
.'

He simply shrugged, dug his hand into a pants pocket and thrust a fistful of crumpled $20 notes towards me. ‘All right. You better pop up to the shop and get us some tucker straight away. No time for anything fancy. Just bring back all the roast chickens they've got.'

And that's what we had – for dinner, breakfast and lunch the following day. By the end of the race the whole boat reeked of chicken fat, every surface was greasy and nobody ever wanted to see another drumstick for as long as they lived.

It's a consistent affectation among Australian blokes that they don't much care what they eat so long as there's lots of it and it contains cooked dead animals of some kind. Sailors tend to fit squarely within that anti-epicurean paradigm and often delight in swapping horror stories about how appalling or scarce the food was during their last passage. At the same time, a good galley slave is often the most prized member of any crew. Say ‘yes' in answer to the standard ‘Do you cook?' question and you're halfway to securing a berth. Prove that you can, indeed, dish up hot, palatable food at regular intervals in most conditions and your name will always be among the first jotted down when the owner begins assembling a
team for the next major event. But my own self-appointed status as the person who usually looks after the pre-race provisioning and then tries to turn most of that tack into meals has a far more fundamental motivation: I just can't abide the muck we're often forced to consume when anyone else commands the galley.

Sheer sameness is the main enemy. On the morning of long races every crewmember, the skipper included, is expected by custom to bring one frozen meal down to the boat. We each like to pretend we've arrived with something special, but too often everyone has brought minor variations on the same dull theme.

‘What'd you get us for a feed, Brenno?'

‘Wife made a beef stew. How about yours, Steve?'

‘Topside casserole.'

‘That's a sort of beef stew, isn't it?'

‘Suppose so. What'd Curl bring?'

‘Nice big
Boeuf Bourguignon
. Very posh.'

‘What's that like, mate?'

‘Beef stew.'

No matter what we call our individual concoctions, once they've all been thawed out, bunged in the pot and heated for an hour or so, everything comes out as another bloody beef stew.

My earliest ocean-racing experiences introduced me to the depressing sameness of one-dish menus at sea. As the youngest crewmember – and in no position to argue – I was assigned the cooking duties. Our skipper never actually provisioned the boat in any systematic way: he just expected the tucker would magically appear by some mysterious loaves-and-fishes process. His one eccentric concession to onboard catering was to keep a stock of emergency tinned food neatly lined up in the bilge between the two rows of keel bolts. (‘Best to keep the weight down low.') This gourmet's treasure trove comprised cans of sausages, bully beef, mixed veggies and oxtail soup. It was all classic stodge of the period, and the only real food we had on the boat.

So, the first time the inevitable call came of ‘How about a feed, son?' I just lifted the floorboards and scooped up an armload of cans. One small problem. The boat leaked, and the water sloshing around in the bilge had soaked off all the labels. Without any way of knowing what was in those tins until they were open, I cooked by volume alone. Anything and everything went into the pot until there was enough to satisfy six famished sailors. As tradition demands, I handed my skipper the first steaming bowl.

‘What are we eating, young fella?' he demanded.

Panic! The meal was genuinely beyond description. A sudden flash of inspiration.

‘Er … Irish stew, skipper.'

Ten long minutes passed in silence as my famished crewmates methodically chomped their way through the murky swill of assorted gristle I'd lacked the courage to even taste myself.

Finally the skipper spoke. ‘Bloody good, son. We'll have exactly the same again tomorrow night, OK?'

Regrettably, try as we marine chefs might to bring some culinary variety to the menu, great food and serious yacht-racing don't mix. Cruising boats have four-burner stoves, capacious fridges and sturdy cabin tables surrounded by comfortable seating. Some even boast those swanky drop-sided contraptions in the cockpit for elegant dinners and champagne as you ride at anchor somewhere in the Whitsundays. Nice for some. Many boats I've raced on don't even
have
a table. There's a small icebox or fridge, a weak two-burner stove and some tiny lockers to stow fresh fruit and vegetables. Like most ocean-racing crews we eat where we can – braced between bagged sails and the mast, half-lying on one elbow in our racks, jammed against the bottom of the companionway. The general idea is to stuff as much food into your mouth as you can before it gets cold, wet, or splattered all over that spinnaker still waiting to be packed. If you're lucky you might claim the vacant nav station and savour the illicit delights of spilling blobs of gravy over the guesser's
meticulously plotted waypoints. (After two days working into 25 knots of southerly, sailors will do anything for entertainment.)

Consuming food at sea can often be no more than a tiresome physical chore. The body's engine demands fuel to replace our expended energy, so in it goes. There's not much pleasure attached. The job of cooking large meals in a bucking galley is demanding, and sometimes dangerous. Simplifying meals and keeping the amount of time spent in the galley to a minimum are primary goals. Over the decades, I've learned a few basic techniques that can help make onboard catering a little easier, and the results more pleasing to the eternally ravenous crew.

The best fundamental approach is to pre-cook as much as possible. It is so much easier to prepare a selection of meals on shore than attempt those same recipes at sea. Your menu choices should be guided by three simple principles: the food must be tasty and hearty, ready to be re-heated and served as easily as possible, and the crew should be able to eat it from a bowl using only a fork or spoon. Subtle or exotic flavours are a waste of time at sea – everyone wants strong tastes and thick juice or gravy. The solid ingredients of each meal must be in chunks that don't need cutting. For example, make your meatballs small, not rissole-sized gobstoppers.

Once your pre-race kitchen labours have concluded, freeze the results in small disposable takeaway food containers. Those large rectangular Tupperware plastic trays with clip-on lids look ideal but are impractical. By using smaller throwaway containers you can thaw out precisely how much food will be needed for each meal, and there are no washing-up or storage problems afterwards. For the times when it will be too rough to cook in pots, take lots of frozen meat pies or sausage rolls. They can be slowly baked in the oven eight or ten at a time, kept warm for hours, and the crew just help themselves at a convenient moment. Forget about frying unless the sea-state is comfortable. Even that favourite seafarer's breakfast of bacon and egg sandwiches can be hazardous to cook in a swell.
Hot fat or oil is just too risky below when the waves are up, and crawling about the cabin floor looking for runaway rashers isn't likely to inspire much confidence in your culinary skills. When the sea gets nasty, cook in your wet-weather gear. It's a hot and uncomfortable way to work – but safe.

Provisioning for a passage is an art in itself, but some basic principles apply. Buy your bread, fruit and vegetables as late as possible, and ensure they're stowed in a place where air can circulate. Take the snack staples out of their plastic bags – chocolate bars, nuts, jelly snakes and jubes – and put them into simple screw-top plastic containers to keep them fresh and accessible for the crew. Soft-drink cans, ‘Poppers' and bottled water need to be stowed in a logical way so the fridge can be restocked with the minimum of disruption. (And remember that every racing crew drinks twice as much cola and lemon squash as they would on land, so take plenty.) Buy your milk in one-litre plastic containers and immediately decant half the supply into some of those plastic sports-drink squeeze bottles. This is a much simpler and easier way to add milk to tea, coffee and cereal when the boat is on a 40-degree angle of heel. Freeze the rest of the milk for later use.

It's always prudent to assume you'll be at sea for at least a day longer than planned. This involves bringing one or two ‘emergency' meals. Safest is a choice of pastas and pre-made thick sauces, but two-dozen sausages can also go a long way on a cold night. Keep a couple of vacuum-packed block cheeses in reserve, and leave a whole salami or sealed ham at the back of the fridge for desperate times. Don't forget the basics: honey, peanut butter, jam and a good variety of condiments. It's amazing how picky skippers can get about their mustard 100 miles offshore. Olive oil in spray cans is invaluable as a way of coating pots and pans before cooking to reduce the ‘stick' factor. Be careful to provide for the bout of seasickness that's sure to fell someone during the passage. The best dry biscuits to carry for that purpose are plain Saladas – they're easy
to digest, have a light crusting of salt that offers the unfortunate sufferer some taste to enjoy, and the salt also helps encourage the rehydration that's vital for anyone who's just parted with the contents of their stomach.

After all this preparation and hard work, rewards for the ship's provender and cook are few. True, we usually don't have to take our turn doing the washing-up (a tiresome chore at sea), but few of us are excused any significant part of our normal watch duties – we simply go below half an hour early to start preparing the next meal. It can be cheering to have the crew thank you for a decent meal (‘Great grub, mate! Any more?'), and we take secret pride in getting everyone to the finishing line with full bellies, clear minds and energy in reserve.

But there are some sailors whose gustatory indifference astonishes even the most battle-hardened galley slave. I shudder to recall this moment from a long-ago Hobart race. Our watch was huddled on the rail at 2200, slogging slowly to windward just south of Montagu Island. We were settling in for a long, wet night. Chris O'Reilly, rightly renowned at our club for his eccentric appetite, haphazard meal patterns and cast-iron stomach, broke into the conversation to declare himself ‘a bit peckish'.

This was hardly news to the rest of us. ‘Plenty of stuff below, mate. Just help yourself,' and we settled straight back into the normal banter of the rail. But then Chris began patting the pockets of his wet weather jacket like some absent-minded Oxford don searching his waistcoat for a favourite pipe. What on earth was he expecting to find? A steaming slab of lasagne? Two freshly baked quail? His hand stopped over a bulge in the bottom right-hand pocket, the traditional spot to store your torch.

‘Ah, there it is! I thought I still had it somewhere.' We all watched, jaws agape, as Chris triumphantly pulled out a mashed pork pie, and began extricating it from its crumpled cellophane wrapper. ‘Bloody beautiful! I'm really going to enjoy this.'

I couldn't contain my curiosity. ‘How long's that pie been there?'

‘Oh, not long, mate. She'll be sweet.'

‘Well, can you remember when you first put it in your jacket?'

‘Let me think now … er … that's right, it would have been when we were coming back from Southport.'

The Sydney–Gold Coast race is in early July. This was now late December. ‘Chris, that was more than five months ago! You can't possibly eat that!'

But our human garbage-disposal unit was already two mouthfuls into his snack. ‘Nah, don't worry, it's delicious. They put so many chemicals in these bloody things the meat couldn't go off even if it wanted to.'

Only an hour earlier I'd cooked him spicy Italian-style meatballs in butter mushroom sauce served on a bed of jasmine rice. Pearls before swine.