ABOARD AMERICA – This tugboat’s crew is hungry and lonely. Four men work and live aboard Foss Maritime’s Tacoma-based tanker escort 24 hours a day.

They’re on duty for six hours, off duty for six, then back at it for another rotation, 15 days at a stretch, plying Puget Sound from Commencement Bay to Bellingham Bay.

Food is their sustenance, their lifeline and their anchor.

Sitting down to lunch at a galley table that could accommodate a crew twice the size, America’s captain, David Corrie, confided, “It actually gets a little lonely sometimes.”

Lunch and dinner, Corrie said, are the only times the crew gathers. For breakfast, the guys grab what they can when they can.

“Even though we live in a small space, we’re passing,” Corrie said. “We don’t have time for a lot of sea stories.”

But for two hours a day, the men of America can share meals and share each other’s company.

“For us,” Corrie said, “a comfortable galley, a decent meal – that’s nice. Where we unwind is right here, because we either work or sleep. That’s all we got.”

Chief engineer Teddy Edwards, a Foss tug veteran of 38 years who recently started doubling as lunch cook, seconded his captain.

“Food’s the only luxury we’ve got,” Edwards said.

Preparing the crew’s midday meal in a stainless-steel galley kitchen decked out with professional equipment like a Lang 490-volt, four-burner electric stove and home-cooking gear like a George Foreman grill, Edwards reminisced about his “old days” aboard the tug Barbara Foss in the 1970s, when full-time cooks kept crews happy with sumptuous meals of prime rib and fresh-caught crab.

“We had a helluva cook,” Edwards said. “That was one of the big things for years: ‘Hey, look how they eat on a tugboat.’ That’s the one luxury we have. We’re away from our families. I may live in a box, but I’m having steak tonight.”

On this day in May, Edwards prepared tacos, hamburgers, mushroom soup, pasta salad and lemon cake for Corrie, second captain Doug Hajek and deckhand Aaron Brown, who cooks dinner.

“We might not have a real cook,” said Edwards, whose primary job is to keep America’s twin 6,600-horsepower diesel engines humming, “but there’s no reason we can’t eat good. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work at it.”

An experienced camping cook, Edwards operates a floating short-order galley with a touch of home. Except for the waterproof rubber floor, the 6-foot-by-8-foot kitchen is all stainless steel, from the walls to the double sink to the Cuisinart toaster. A stainless-steel refrigerator, sits just outside the galley, moved into the crew’s living quarters to accommodate the dishwasher, also stainless, that the crew’s union contract requires. Farberware knives fill a butcher-block holder. Better Homes and Gardens’ classic checkerboard cookbook sits on a shelf. “I open it when I need a sauce or something,” Edwards said.

Edwards plans his lunch menu after dinner the night before.

“As long as everything is OK down there,” Edwards said, motioning toward the gleaming engine room. “I’m free to do my thing here.”

Edwards’ thing is lunch, which for a guy who grew up on a Pierce County farm eating “meat, potatoes and vegetables,” hews to tradition.

“Lunch to me is lunch,” Edwards said. “It consists of anything from a French dip sandwich to a cheeseburger to a hot turkey sandwich.”

Edwards likes to get a jump-start on lunch after dinner.

“At nights, that’s when I do my salads, when we’re just relaxing, hanging back. It’s therapy.”

Edwards said the hardest part of his cooking duties is coordinating disparate components of disparate dishes. As he spoke, Edwards sautéed taco meat for the entree (soft tacos and taco salad) and scalded milk for mushroom soup.

“You’ve got to get the pasta, you’ve got to get the sauce together,” he said. “It’s all gotta be done at the same time.”

Mealtime itself is also a juggling act. The crew’s union contract requires that meals be served from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and from 7:30-8:30 p.m.

“That’s when they’re obligated to serve meals,” Corrie, the captain, said. “Now for when you actually eat it … Well, if you show up at 11:30 and have to be on watch at 12, that gives you a half-hour to eat.”

But, as Corrie noted, “By the law of the sea, you usually start 10 to 15 minutes early. So that only gives you 15 minutes to eat.”

Leftovers are an issue.

“Guys don’t eat leftovers,” Edwards said, noting some ribs that Brown, the night cook, had made. “He had a bit left over. I put them out on a plate. Nobody would eat them. I guess I just do it out of courtesy.”

Most leftovers are discarded.

“You really don’t have enough space to keep stuff,” Edwards said, pointing to the refrigerator brimming with deli meats, milk, eggs, produce and all the brand-name grocery comforts of home. “It’s like home. You’ve got little bit of this and a little bit of that in containers. After three days, you empty them all out in the garbage can.”

As captain, Corrie does the shopping, buying fresh fish from Johnny’s Seafood, not far from America’s berth on the Foss Waterway, relying on Costco for bulk purchases and online orders from Albertsons.com that are delivered to the tug, along with the occasional game meat a crew member shoots. Corrie wouldn’t disclose his crew’s monthly food budget but said, “It’s generous. We get everything we want.”

Except for free live crab. The days of hanging crab pots over the sides of tugs are gone, Corrie said. The America’s deck sits 20 feet above the water, too high to toss a crab pot.

Edwards remembers Crab Supreme on the Barbara Foss.

“We’d catch them off the side, and we’d have big mountains of crab on a New England biscuit,” he said. “Then we’d put cheddar cheese on it, a little Johnnie’s seasoning and put it on the broiler.”

A hungry memory flashed across Edwards’ face as he tried to recapture the past on a modern budget, recalling the gustatory glory of Crab Supreme and a long-gone Tacoma restaurant that was shaped like a ship.

“I do the same thing with salad shrimp,” Edwards said. “You can take salad shrimp and just a little mayo to hold it. And then take a little gob of cocktail sauce, put a piece of cheddar on top and sprinkle it with some Johnny’s and throw it in the microwave and, man, you’d think you were living at Top of the Ocean.” Editor’s note: Corrie, Edwards and other members of the Foss tug America have since been reassigned to other boats. Ed Murrieta: 253-597-8678

blogs.thenewstribune.com/edsdiner

SAILORS’ DIETS

While sailors would occasionally eat meat and eggs, according to the British National Maritime Museum, sailors’ diets during the tall ships era “was quite boring and not very nutritious, so sailors would catch fish and seabirds to eat as well.”

Hardtack biscuits made up a bulk of sailors’ diets, and as the Maritime Museum’s Web site notes, the biscuits themselves were often filled with weevils, the little grubs that infest flour.

On wooden ships, the museum notes, a fire built in a box of sand served as a stove for cooking and boiling water. Brick galleys came later.

While it was hard to keep fresh water fresh, alcohol preserved their beer, so they’d wash down their meals with beer.