The US Merchant Marine in general eats pretty damned good. That goes for not only ships but seafarers in general. It's an important part of a sailor's morale and it's a bitch for a sailor to lose weight if he packs on the pounds. It's also very easy to gain weight at sea because of this.
On top of this, the most of the companies want the skippers to spend it all. It is one of the few places where the companies (generally speaking) don't want to save money.
The way it works on the tugs is that a tug skipper is issued a negotiable instrument of some sort, cash, check, credit card or whatever and is supposed to feed the crew based on X dollars/man/day. He's on his own as to how he gets the grub.
A handful show up with a pickup full of grub on crew change day. They buy it all and seem to have it down to a science.
What it looks like to me is the really successful ones delegate things to various crew members. One guy may be able to get a deal on canned goods because his uncle runs a store of some sort, another guy lives near a wholesale fish or meat market and yet another may have some deal going on paper goods. They all meet up on crew change day and bring everything on board and settle up with the skipper. They work as a team.
I have only had one skipper that was a cheapskate with the grub and was a part of the near mutiny over it.
For some reason or another the idiot had it in his head that if he didn't spend it all the entire fleet was going to line up in starched and pressed overalls and watch him get a medal if he saved the company money on grub.
I, of course, was pretty much a smart ass about things and early on figured out how to get someone ashore to buy me a big bag of limes. I served a quarter of a lime to each man at noon.
It took a few days for the skipper to figure out why I did such a curious thing while the entire crew ate their quarter lime without question at noon.
For those that don't know, limes were traditionally served to the Royal Navy to prevent scurvy. That's why Brit sailors (and sometime Brits in general) are often called 'Limeys'.
When he figured it out he blew a fuse and the crew turned on him like a pack of mad dogs. It got pretty heated and we were in Long Island Sound when things blew up and we threatened to cast him adrift in a rubber raft in the middle of the Sound. We started getting decent grub immediately afterwards.
Other than that I never once saw a tug skipper short the crew on grub. However I have heard stories about some fly by night companies not paying attention and skippers making their crew live on hot dogs and pocketing much of the grub money.
One well respected skipper I spoke with had an interesting take on things. He said he paid little attention to the grub money situation and said to me, "If we overspend, we overspend. What I do is look at the trash can every day or two. It they're eating it, they're eating it. If they throw too much away I say something."
Some crews eat well and have some money left over. They generally put it in the pot for a rainy day. If the pot gets too big they sometimes buy something for the boat. I knew of one that every several months when the pot grew they'd quietly split up the leftover money.
Most generally spend it all. It's grub money so they buy grub with it.
For the barge men things are a little different.
With the company I started with they had lines of credit all over the coast and I would go to one of the markets and pick up what we needed. No money would change hands, one would just sign for it.
One clown (there's always one that ruins it for others) would sometimes sneak ashore to the market and grab a couple of expensive cuts of meat to take home. Someone got wind of it and instead of ratting him out they handled it. The system worked fairly well as it was and we didn't want to have the office step in and turn it into a mess over one thief.
Both tankermen would confer and make a list and one would go ashore and shop.
The company I retired from was different. They would put a fixed per diem as an extra in one's paycheck and the individual tankerman was on their own. The tug skippers got money for their crew's grub.
In a way this caused confusion as when my wife would see the paycheck she'd forget that it also contained my grub money. It took her some time to get used to it. I do wish they had simply issued a seperate check but it worked.
Some crews picked up their own grub as individuals, others would team up. In the two long term situations I found myself in we teamed up. The first person I teamed with would bring in enough for the pair of us and we'd split the bill down the middle. I'd pay him in cash. I never even bothered to look at receipts. I could tell just by looking at what I ate that I was coming out ahead.
My wife asked me about this once and I told her that we trusted each other with our lives so I wasn't worried about being cheated. I knew I wasn't. Besides he was a super shopper and constantly amazed me with the deals he got. I could not have done nearly as well alone.
The second long term situation was a bit different. He often times flew into work. I drove.
He'd email me a list or often give me one when we ended a tour. Then about a week before we returned to work he'd wire me enough money to buy half the grub. I'd shop and throw it all in the back of my pickup and take it all to work with me.
It should be noted that I only had to make one single trip because his list covered every single grain of salt, every paper towel and every can of beans we needed for the entire tour and we NEVER ran out of anything. We'd usually have leftovers we'd store for later tours.
He generally wound up sending me a couple bucks too much and I'd reimburse him. He never sweated the small stuff. Neither did I.
Part of the reason for teaming up like that is because our money went further. For example one big can of beans that would feed two people cost a lot less than two individual servings and often have some left over.
Very, very rarely a barge would have to be unmanned and the tankermen forced to ride the tug. When that happened we'd eat on the tug, of course. A handful of skippers quietly fed us and said nothing about it. Ohers would demand our grub money based on our per diem for every day we rode the tug. Others would just charge us a token. Some would call the office and ask for extra money and get it, supposedly to be deducted from our grub money but I don't ever recall it catching up with me.
I tried to keep a few bucks set aside for the unlikely event that we were forced to ride the tug. I only remember having to cough up full price one time which was fair enough under the circumstances as we ate exeptionally well.
My per diem when I retired was $25/day and I could eat well on that except for in New York Harbor or San Francisco where it did stretch a little thin but even then it wasn't too bad.
As to be expected there were a couple of cheapskates out there that lived on cereal, hot dogs and soda crackers so they could keep most of their per diem. I know of one that was doing that because he had a sick kid and while insurance paid most of the bills he was still strapped for associated expenses. One night before crew change I tossed him a leftover steak from our freezer and he about liked to cry out of gratitude but he was an exception.
We did have two freezers on board, one for each crew and for the most part we stayed out of each other's freezers and storage cabinets. Occasionally the relief crew would borrow something but they almost always replaced it or at least reimbursed us.
The problem came up when someone got either sick or pulled off a boat. Occasionally temporary reliefs would plunder a freezer.
At the first place we worked it was not as bad because we hadn't directly paid for it to begin with. At the second place I worked it would cause blood fueds. Stealing our grub was the same as stealing our money. We had paid for it.
Once my then captain and I were pulled off to go to court to testify and came back a week later to find we had been plundered. We got our pound of flesh when we ran into the thief arriving next crew change. He had his grub in the back of his pickup and when he got out of it to check in we cleaned it out and took it aboard with us. Almost every bite of it. I think we left him a pack of hot dogs and a bag of chips to add insult to injury. By the time he got back to find an empty pickup we were long gone.
The moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth was epic.
The office got involved, there was a ballyhoo but I really think our port captain knew what had happened and turned a blind eye. He was not stupid. I think he had figured out what happened and decided, "Fair enough!"
I recall that one plunderer was handed a pawn ticket by his victim who had stolen something of his in return and pawned it to get his money back. I also heard of an off the property fist fight over plundering.
With the brief early on one time exception I always ate as well or even better at work than I ate at home.
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