By Matthew Maples

I was woken up for dinner and watch at 1900. After a few minutes of thinking about moving I got up, grabbed my gear and stepped through the silent and empty tweendeck corridor. No sound was to be heard besides the pattering of my feet. As I passed the galley I peeked inside...no one there? Kind of strange around dinnertime, but not too unusual.

From an empty tweendeck, I stepped onto a busy main deck - quite busy! Decorative lights and flags were hanging over a smoky barbeque grill, upon which was a heap of searing fish fillets tended by Tom and Lucy. A table of salad, perfect potatoes (roasted and seasoned just the way I favor them) and even Pina Colada's was the centrepiece of the main deck. Dance hits and misses of the 80's and 90's played over the deckhouse speakers.

My bleary eyed and blatantly surprised look must have caught the eye of our cook, Rensje. She grinned and waved to me as she read my expression, which must have gone from surprised, to excited and hungry near-instantaneously. This was no ordinary dinner, but an impromptu BBQ on deck. Now don't get me wrong, dinners on Europa are, as a norm, spectacular (a very strong reason as to why I want to keep coming back to this ship - great food and plenty of it - you won't find both everywhere on tall ships!) This particular dinner however finds its way into the logbook because it is the first one to take me completely by surprise (BBQ's are usually at the end of a voyage).

Apparently it took me by surprise precisely because it was not planned. Supposedly it all began with the mate, Marteyn, wanting an extended happy hour with Pina Coladas. Then someone realized that Pina Colada's needed to be accented with Mahi Mahi fillets on the grill. Well, if the grill comes out, then it is something of a BBQ so you need to have those delicious roasted potatoes and a cool salad right? But if you are going to go through the trouble of having a BBQ, you need to have the festive lights! Everyone also knows that the mate or Woody has the perfect playlist to match the lights. So in the end, what started as an accent to happy hour became a lovely deck BBQ.

At least, that's how I think it happened from what I gathered from Rensje. She says it was necessary to have surprises to "keep everyone alive". Besides, she added, it was a good night for a BBQ because it was a nice night, with a perfect breeze and a high, bright moon to loom over our lights. I nodded in agreement as I munched on the Mahi Mahi - seared in such a way that it was pink and tasted more like a steak than a fish. (I usually think Mahi tastes like chicken, but Tom tells me that olive oil makes the difference!). All in all, a nice surprise dinner, and we like nice surprises around here.

After dinner it was time to take over the watch. Today was my galley duty day - time to clean the galley, bake bread and do other odd jobs that the cook needs done. I realized as I was moving laundry while waiting on baking bread just how unique the ship is; in the same hour I did laundry on Dutch-labeled washing machines, and baked brownies from packaging exclusively in Spanish. Good thing I speak neither languages. 

I remember my first days on the crew last summer and being told to mind the laundry. "Laundry" I think to myself at that time, "that should be easy, I've been doing laundry for years!" Then I take a look at our twin laundry machines in the forecastle. "Uh oh," the machine and its settings are labelled only in Dutch. "Well," I think to myself, "this can't be too hard to pick something that makes sense right?" I settled on a setting called "centrifugeren" - It sounded good, centrifugeren sounds like centrifuge, which means a lot of spinning. Sounds like a right proper cleaning!" If lots of spinning is good enough to make nuclear reactor fuel, then it must be good enough for our laundry! Right? No! I find out some days and many laundry loads later that centrifugeren is little more than a dry spin in the machine. Not very useful! This is what you get when you assume too much.

The cook requested some sort of treat for tonight after the bread. I settled on brownies - not only because I wanted some, but because it sounded relatively simple (and therefore within reach of my baking skills). What should have been simple becomes much more complex when I discover that the ready-mix packages of brownies were bought in Argentina, and therefore completely in Spanish. This complicates what should have been an "idiot-proof" task. With some help from the rest of the watch we deciphered the boxes to come up with the "gist" of the recipe. Just when I think the worst is over I discover that the recipe calls for butter in grams - but the butter I find at first is labelled in ounces. Not wanting to be too daring, I put it back and dig deep until I find butter we bought in a Spanish-speaking country, and therefore, labeled in grams!  So far so good, the mix goes in the pans and into the oven.

Fifteen minutes later I smell that baking chocolate fill the galley nicely. I peep in for a peek…and…"Oh bloody hell!" I discover that my brownies are baking slanted in the pan! The heel of the ship due to our sails is causing the brownies to bake in a diagonal plane! I went up to the wheelhouse to tell Captain Robert that he needed to tack the ship because our current course was causing my brownies to bake slanted! I was completely joking, of course, ( I hope he took it as a joke!) and instead "tacked" the brownies in the oven by switching them around. It was too late though, and as I looked at my finished, lopsided brownies, I realized that everyone else will know tomorrow that they were supposed to be "idiot proof" as well…!"