Ami Burns – The importance of food at sea

I find it unbelievable how important food is. I mean I don’t actually eat very much at sea because unless you’re training and the sports equipment’s in, you don’t do a lot and so I can’t justify eating some of the amazing food (laughs) that they put out at the beginning of the Patrol particularly but it really is a source of morale, not only is it a source or morale, it’s how you know what time of day it is, which you probably have heard already.

You know, you might wake up because of the Watch patterns and go, “I don’t know what day it is and I don’t know what time it is” and you think ‘OK, well there’s a curry on so it’s Wednesday teatime’.

Or, you know, there is fish and chips so you know it’s going to be Friday lunchtime and people look forward to it, you know, it’s part of the countdown for, seven fish Friday’s until we get home.

Simon: Oh is it? Right.

Yeah absolutely, you know seven steak nights until you get home, it really is, and people will take their favourite things to sea. I had a huge … when I was training, on my second training Patrol I had a grip, a bag probably three times the size of your rucksack, full of biscuits.

It was just biscuits for Boards, for Watch Keeping, you know, I probably snuck a couple of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges in there, I once paid £10 for a Terry’s Chocolate Orange at sea because that’s, that’s morale. When I went, when I, the first time I went on Patrol I hadn’t really switched on to it and then every subsequent Patrol I have like a freezer bag every week and I have one thing a day that is a treat, you know like a Freddo chocolate or a hot chocolate sachet or a little pot of jelly because jelly keeps really well for the whole Patrol.

There’s, and then basically I’ll take, you know, I’ll go into the space where this bag is kept, probably in the machine space and it gets covered in all sorts and you’ll dig it out and you’ll be like right, week 12, week 12 treats are a mint chocolate orange or, you know, and that’s just for me, there might be a little bag of peanuts.

Some people might take protein powders and you know, a lot of people work out really hard at sea and will come back looking amazing if we’ve got the gym in, for sure, so yeah it really is important. If I don’t get trifle on a Sunday, don’t come to the manoeuvring because I’ll be grumpy and there’ll be tears.

They once made trifle with Christmas Pudding in. I told somebody this story the other day and the Chef’s used to put my trifle to one side because of the Watch Keeping routines, I was asleep over that dinner.

And they put trifle to one side in the fridge so that when I got up at 12 o’clock at night to go on Watch for one, I’d get my trifle and I’d go back aft and sit in manoeuvring and so I was so excited I sat down with my trifle and as I sort of tucked in it had Christmas Pudding in it and I hate Christmas Pudding and like, you look forward all week to your trifle on a Sunday, and someone put Christmas Pudding in it, it was, I was devastated, I think I was in a bad mood for about four days.