A Feast Afloat
Eating while afloat ranks among my greatest pleasures, with the old saw about salt air quickening the appetite proving true in my experience. Many memories involving food and boats make me lick my old seadog’s chops to this day, and here are six eats I remember with relish. Warning to gourmets: This is boat — not haute — cuisine.
Aboard our family’s 35-foot Ohlson yawl, Carousel, my mother was St. George to the alcohol stove’s dragon. She fought valiant battles to light it, at times igniting billows of blue flame and shrieking and cursing at it like the true salt she was. When she subdued it, she produced a range of chow from spaghetti to stew, but no dish was more memorable than her signature ham steak flambé — the flambé being only occasional and accidental. I can still smell the aroma and smoke rising from the cast-iron skillet, the ham laden with pineapple rings and doused with brown sugar and rum, sizzling and spitting above the rippling blue fangs of the flames, the stove always lying in wait for a chance to sputter or spew.
Of my two older sisters, Leslie and Alison, Alison fell for the sailing life, and she perfected a trademark lunch while underway on her and her husband, Tom’s, 30-foot Hunter. It may not have involved epic battles with fire-breathing appliances, but it was legendary in its own right. The mystery of how Swanson’s canned chicken heaped on white bread could satisfy us so much remains unsolved to this day. I suspect such humble fare became a wonder of flavor and sustenance only because we devoured it in the cockpit of a sloop cruising from the back creeks to the open waters of Chesapeake Bay. Maybe the preservatives helped, too.
I lived aboard Carousel for a week while I was in college — not to sail her, but to work on her. The boat never left her slip in Stamford, Connecticut, and I never left her slip, either, at least not physically, except to lie sweating in my berth at night imagining myself sailing up Long Island Sound to Plum Gut, a bottleneck of water between Plum Island and Orient Point that becomes a bona fide maelstrom at certain tides, and sailing into the widening waters beyond to other thrilling places. I sustained myself on time-honored college boy rations of beef stew spooned out of the can at room temperature, which was plenty steamy given that this was mid-July.
Peanut butter sandwiches seemed to blend one into the other until one sultry evening, when I stood in the companionway watching cloud-to-cloud lightning flicker and dance closer overhead. I’d just troweled on chunky peanut butter onto one slice of bread when a simultaneous lighting strike and artillery blast of thunder near the boat made me jump so much that the open-faced sandwich cartwheeled out of my hand to the deck face down. That much peanut butter was far too precious to waste; I needed fuel to continue sanding the decks on my hands and knees, readying them for coats of Tip Top Teak Deck Brightener. Mostly I was thankful that my dinner hadn’t become peanut butter sandwich flambé.
On our maiden voyage aboard our 12-foot catboat, Finn, in 2006, my wife packed a lunch including a bag of Goldfish (the ultimate seafood) to accompany our bottle of champagne. I realized that the goldfish featured on the bag was named Finn — which made the salty morsels even more delectable — and the Veuve Cliquot did its part, too. No matter that we lost the breeze halfway into Buzzards Bay, a notoriously fickle body of water between Cape Cod and mainland Massachusetts, and had to paddle back to the mooring before a thunderstorm swept down on us; Goldfish of the Finn variety remain our go-to crunchies.
You might think that working as a deckhand aboard a lobster boat more than 40 years ago would have afforded me many chances to partake of the coveted crustacean. Not so aboard the Gertrude H., Harry Hunt’s wood Virginia-built wood workboat. Harry won renown for pioneering the offshore lobster fishery in the canyons of the continental shelf. In the short time I worked on the boat, the lobsters went to the market, not into the pot for the crew — except on one occasion.
Harry, two other crewmen — one of them my longtime shipmate Chris—and I were stacking gear in Harry’s trap yard at his home in Orleans, doing the drudgery of the dreaded shorework. All morning, we hefted waterlogged wooden traps off the truck to stack them for the winter. Finally, a lunch break arrived, and so did Harry’s wife, Gertrude, sailing out of the house bearing a platter of sandwiches with slag heaps of fresh steamed lobster barely contained between slices of whole wheat bread—an impromptu all-you-can-eat outdoor lobsterfest.
Commercial fishing whet the appetite — no sleep and dead hauls will do that to a stomach — but the demands of the work left little time to satisfy it. I was the mate aboard a 35-foot wood Maine-built boat, where most meals consisted of slabs of cold cuts and American cheese on bulky rolls, gobbled between drifts while we jigged for codfish or trolled for striped bass in the rips of Nantucket Shoals. One day, we hit on a school of scrod. Some of the fish were so small they resembled pan-sized trout more than codfish, especially with their glistening gold and green jewel-like markings.
Once the day was done and we ran inshore to anchor for the night on the Fishing Rip, Rick, my skipper, said “Let’s treat ourselves.” After I cleaned two 10-inch fish, he fired up the Coleman stove in the pilothouse, sliced a knob of butter into the skillet, let it brown, and set the fish to sautéing. The fish was so fresh it flaked apart in the pan, and so light and white it evaporated in a sweet, tender cloud in your mouth. And thus the cold cuts and processed cheese that sustained us for so long fell from grace, if only temporarily. Never before or since have I eaten such a simple yet toothsome dish.
Goodness: I’ve written myself up an appetite. Excuse me while I hunt down a snack. Peanut butter sandwich flambé, anyone?