I am sitting at a table, in a small house, on an Island off the coast of Massachusetts thinking about my time as a sea cook on tall ships. It’s storming outside and I have a couple of roof jobs going, one of which is just tar papered. Instead of worrying about it I am thinking about the Pacific. The tropics. The sea.

When my brothers and I were young our father told us stories of his maternal grandfather, Daddy D, who had worked on coastal schooners along the Eastern Seaboard in the early part of the last century. He had gone to sea from his home on Prince Edward Island at the tender age of seven as a cabin boy and moved up the ranks. When he was 17 and a first mate he got hit by a boom in a storm off the coast of New Jersey, which blinded him in one eye and ended his seagoing career. He then became a carpenter, even making two violins that were, as the story goes, commissioned by the Boston symphony.

Listening to the stories and seeing the ancient half models that we had hanging around the house, knowing that in our history there was once a sailor, inspired all of us brothers. Daddy D was also said to be quite a fiddler, often regaling the family with fiddle tunes at parties, picnics and such. My maternal grandfather was also known as a great singer and a lover of the opera. From these two ancestors I received the call to become a musician and eventually a sailor. The sailor’s life is often portrayed as a mystical one, full of taboos aboard ship, things seen at sea, and things met on land and strange encounters with people. I tell you it’s all true.

I got my first taste of the sea on fishing boats out of Provincetown. It was by chance that I ended up working on tall ships as cook. Instead of going to college I spent my late teens and early twenties working in bakeries and restaurants, so I had good training as a cook and a baker and we always cooked at home growing up. Being the cook seemed a good way to go. Cooks are paid better than deckhands, and you were always nearest the food.

My first job cooking on Tall Ships came by chance in 1987 when I visited Martha’s Vineyard. It was on the Shenandoah, a 100-plus foot square-rigged topsail schooner engaged in weeklong charters around the Island and as far afield as Rhode Island and Nantucket for the Coastwise Packet Co., aka The Black Dog Tall Ships.

Getting jobs on tall ships has always been a haphazard journey. Someone gives me a tip and I call a captain. He says get your gear and show up on the dock. I show up on the dock and get on the ship and they show me the galley, the stove, the storage space and my bunk. The captain tells me how many people I’m going to feed and how much money I have to spend and when the ship will be leaving the dock and roughly how long I will be away. Then I go to the supermarket and fill up numerous carts with all sorts of ingredients, get to the checkout counter where the cashier recognizes that I am the cook on a ship. Sometimes the manager of the store opens a special row for me and I notice the nervous smiles of the store workers. I wonder if they are helping me through to be nice or to get rid of me quicker?

The modern day community of tall ships is a miniscule compared to when big ship sailing was at its height. There are only so many skippers, most of whom know one another and there are far too few cooks. Every few years I get the call. Another captain, another ship. The skippers know that the cooks, the real sea cooks, the truly twisted ones, just want to get out to sea. They use that knowledge as a hole card. No one in their right mind would sign up to cook for 50 people at sea on a 150-foot ship. The responsibility is equal to the difficulty. It’s not about the times when all is well, the ship gliding along at five or six knots with a smooth sea and a steady wind, the stove working fine and all the food fresh. It’s about when a storm hits and the heart of the ship has to stay pumping.

The captain stumbles by and pokes his head in the galley. You’re going against the wind in a 15-foot confused chop. The rain is pelting outside and things are flying all around in the galley. You have yourself wedged against the bulkhead and your foot pressed up on the counter next to the stove. The captain sees you duking it out with the storm, the ship and the sea, and you’re holding a pot of stew with one hand and hitting the blower on the front of the stove to keep it running with the other. He looks at the stew.

“What kind of slop you got today?”

“Same as yesterday.”

“You mean the goo slop?”

“That’s the ticket, mon capitan.”

“You’re a whack job, you know that.”

“Yessiree, mon skipisan.”

“As you were.”

Cooking on a ship, providing the sustenance for 30 to 50 people day in and day out with one day off after six days on, for months at a time twists you. You hold the key to the larder. You hold the key to everyone’s stomach. Thus you hold the key to everyone’s happiness. This allows you to see the human in its most essential state. They hate you. Then they love you. Then they hate you. They always think they can do your job. Until they actually try it on your day off.

Joe Keenan is a musician, writer, baker and roofer living in West Tisbury.