Cooking at sea is its own weirdness. And the stuff you have in your gigantic land lubber kitchen may not translate to a narrow bouncy galley. You need different stuff, so let’s just start with First Principles.

The Wine Opener.

My nephew told me that step one to any recipe is … open the wine, which is one of the 2700 hundred reasons I love this guy.

Many sea-farers do not drink at all at sea, maintain a “dry boat”, abstain, and many other sad sad euphemisms for not having wine. I however believe that there are exceptions to every rule (except the rule that there are exceptions to every rule), and sometimes you might need to flavor the food or just flavor the chef up a bit. In any case, one should never let rigid dogma get in the way of an afternoon Chardonnay.

And speaking of wine, if you have non-screw cap wine bottles and need a wine opener, don’t get the fancy “rabbit” one that will absolutely break right when you need it, or the one that runs on the batteries that will absolutely corrode in the salt air.

You need the classic model with those two arms that go wide like jumping jacks, vaguely suggesting that there might be some kind of calorie burn going on other than those 6 ounce curls you’ll be doing.

The bottom line is that most stuff will break, and everything else will corrode. They just do, welcome to life at sea. So when you’re getting equipment for the galley, go simple, go mechanical, and go industrial strength. (And btw people, don’t get snooty about the wine because screwcap wine doesn’t have to mean it’s sold by the gallon jug and consumed by your pearl-clutching aunt Marge.)

Plastic Everything.

I had the most beautiful square Bushmills Irish whiskey glass, which was scored directly from the distillery in Northern Ireland. I love love loved that glass as it was perfect for a chilly end-o-the-day Pastis on warm breezy evenings. But the boat gods were clearly not as enamored as I was, probably because I wasn’t sharing my Bushmills with them (mea culpa). On one particularly bouncy passage, “somehow” the cupboard door latch let go as we were on a hard heel to port. The cupboard is to starboard, which means everything hurled forward through the formerly secure latch and slammed to the floor.

My beloved glass shattered into a zillion shards, all scattered about the floor waiting like fanged teeth for the inevitable bare feet that rushed to clean up (who wears shoes on a boat anyway?).

So before you go to sea, just expect that your plates, glasses, and cutlery will be spiked to the floor at some point, like Steve Gronkowski just scored a touchdown with them. If they can take that kind of abuse, those are the kitchen implements you need.

And, pro tip, if you can get plates with rubber gaskets on the bottom, you totally buy them. When you serve food on plates without those gaskets, they will always slip and slide that red pasta sauce right on your shorts or those new cushion covers you’re so proud of.

Rubber bottoms. Get the rubber bottoms to keep your food off the floor.

Big Fat Lips and Roll Bars.

Boat cupboards are different. They normally have a good solid inch of border sticking up as a lip to prevent critical materials like your secret stash of Tim Tams from crashing to the floor in front of everyone. Protect your right to smuggle in cookies by placing them securely behind those big fat lips.

Most galley cabinets and cupboards have these already, although we did have to create a new one once. Just to the left of the stove is a perfect spot for my cutting board, which is exactly the height of the big fat lip. That means whatever is on that cutting board can just slide right over the edge and onto the floor. So after a large cutting knife launched off the edge and landed dangerously close to my toe (who wears shoes on a boat?), we created a new lip to save our endangered feet.

Also, you may have to improvise a roll bar in the pantry (as in this picture). To make this diagonal stick effective, we put the tall things on the right, medium height items in the middle and the short squatty guys on the left. The annoyingly attentive reader will notice that the roll bar pictured here was placed in the opposite orientation for this shot. But never fear, the offending parties have been consigned to the brig until further notice.

And sometimes you just have to make stuff up and do whatever you can with whatever you’ve got. On the passage from Bermuda to the Azores, we got hit by a following storm, and waves that seemed like 2-3 story buildings were chasing us from behind.

With all the slamming about, a couple of latches kept releasing so we just grabbed kitchen towels and stuffed them in the doors, essentially wedging them shut — a sketchy solution, but it totally worked.

Bottom Line.

Boat galleys are just different. With all the peculiar factors that sea life can cause like cabinets randomly launching their contents onto the floor, the corrosion of every single thing ever, or boat gods occasionally hurling knives off cutting boards, the galley definitely is its own thing. And all these little crazy ingredients add ample spice to the soup of cooking on board.