Hunter Gets Published!

 Our Late Sea Cook, "Hunter" is a Published Author!

Just two days ago, Hunter's latest, and only book was published in hard copy on Amazon.com. 30 some-odd years of sea-cook experience, stories, lessons learned, tips and techniques finally codified in just 88 pages of wisdom.  I'm not joking. All the more poignant, in that Hunter threw out his anchor just two months ago, and retired, returning to his family in the Dominican Republic. Spirit of South Carolina was his last ship. His quote still rings: "Your favorite ship... is the one you're on." 

The book is a culmination of about 4 years of tinkering since the idea was first hatched.  Back in 2019, Captain Richard Bailey, past Commander of HMS Rose, Spirit of South Carolina, and most lately, Harvey Gamage, had made a hasty phone call to Hunter requesting help for Bailey's new cook aboard Harvey Gamage.  His new hire had cooking experience, but didn't know his way around a traditional sailing vessels, galley, with all the nuanced and stark challenges around feeding and caring for a schooner full of crew at sea.  Hunter had been sea cook under Captain Bailey for most of his 16 years of command of HMS Rose (which later transformed by MGM into HMS Surprise, for the Movie Master and Commander).   And so he asked if Hunter could just jot down some tips, techniques, general advice, that he could hand over to his new hire to help get him started. 

Hunter, along with CAPT Dan Cleveland, and Mate, Charley Porzelt had been left largely idle, while the governing Board decided what to do with the ship after the COVID Pandemic struck.  He had time on his hands.  Without hesitation, Hunter found a spare composition notebook and started writing.  In days he'd filled 23 pages and was still going.  I offered to transcribe his notes into a Word document as he completed each section or topic, to make the thing more readable, easier to organize, and edit.- it was looking like more than a few pages. He readily agreed.  As I gathered his pages from the composition book and read, and read.. I realized I was reading .. "real gold". This was good stuff, practical, easily understood. with a little organization, basic editing, fleshing out of content in some areas, it could be turned into a book or something.  

I pushed that idea to him after I'd transcribed about 30 pages.  I offered to edit the thing for him. He shrugged and allowed me to knock myself out.

And so with lots of time on my own hands,  I started my own project, to  organize the topics, and generally format it into a manuscript, with figures, a few illustrations, a table of contents. In the next three weeks, around August 2019, we had a manuscript in a plastic portfolio presentation binder. I stuffed it in my sea bag and flew north to Portland Maine where I boarded the schooner Harvey Gamage and handed over the manuscript to Tyler Calderwood, banquet chef out of Disney World Resort, looking for a lifestyle change I guess. He certainly got it. He also devoured Hunter's manuscript.  

On returning to Charleston, I proposed to Hunter that he flesh out the manuscript in some areas, and add a few topics, with a concept that we could distribute something of use for other sea cooks,, maybe even publish it on Kindle.  I have a younger brother, self published in 5 novels, both online and otherwise, and through his experience and advice I built out the writing project. Hunter luke-warmly agreed, but he had a condition.  He wanted a copy to be offered free of charge to every Tall ship in the industry.  I didn't try to count all the ships that might meet that criteria,,, I probably should have, but we left it as "Deal".  and leave the issue of financing all those free copies to a later day.

Over the next three years, off and on, Hunter would open the composition book and pencil in some remarks,, sometimes just a list, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, once or twice a whole chapter exploded out of his comp book. At some point in 2022, the muse apparently petered out. I proposed a couple of topics to possibly shake loose his thoughts around him, but he didn't take me up on it., And so I refocused my efforts from compiling to final editing, started reviewing online Tutorials on Kindle Creator. 

The final editing process and Kindle reviews was rigorous, but not all that hard. By late spring, 2023 I had gone as far as I could with it, had run it thru numerous automated grammar-spell checks, even had my brother, the published author review it. He made a few high value edits to it, in areas, I would never have thought of. In June I uploaded the pdf into Kindle Create, the online self-publishing app and started an iterative process of sending it through sequences of review. By October, the computerized red-ink notes and underlines/circles disappeared.  Hunter had just disembarked the schooner to head home.  He absent-mindedly agreed on a selling price we would ask. He expressed little interest in the sales potential, and only reiterated his wish to get a copy out to any ship that wanted it.

On uploading I ordered six "proof" copies, for a nominal price of $4 a pop, and sent them out to some tall ship colleagues to review.   A few returned enthusiastic comments. Nothing really negative-which made me a bit uneasy.  I chose a cover photo out of our Ship's Google photo album collection, a chopped image of the schooner ghosting along under full press. A little self-indulgence, the figure on forward lookout was me. On 26 November, four days ago, I uploaded a final .pdf manuscript, clicked, "Send" and it was done.  

The e-book is supposed to follow, after some synching is done with Kindle.  Most proceeds of sales will go to cover cost of printing the free copies and postage, for delivery to the remaining tall ship fleet.