The Galley is one of the most important places on a boat, and it is crucial to keep the stewards happy if you want to keep your belly full. However, the Galley can also be one of the more dangerous places to work. Accidents can occur all too easily as the boat rocks to and fro. Meanwhile, the stewards are handling knives, hot pans, hot food, and sometimes very heavy materials. With one good roll, disaster can occur. On our trip, the assistant steward was covered in burns and cuts, having never truly acquired their sea legs.

As students aboard the vessel, we are required to rotate through Galley duties as assistants to the stewards. During my three days in the Galley, I, as an engineer, naturally sought opportunities for improvement. We were fortunate to have a head steward who teaches bread baking on land, so we were never in short supply of delicious freshly baked bread and other goods. Yet issue with backing on a boat is that on particularly rocky days or when the boat was heavily pitched over. The still-fluid bread batter, when placed in the oven, would slosh and attempt to remain level. This dramatically increased baking time and caused the bread, cake, or other baked goods to come out wonky and lopsided.

On smaller cruising vessels, the ovens and stoves are gimbaled, keeping the cooking surface normal to the pull of gravity, eliminating sloshing issues. Thus, we needed to recreate this effect inside the ovens on the Robert C. Seamans to fix this issue. The conceptual ideas that were developed utilized a gimbaled tray to keep the batter level. Modeled very similarly after the gimbaled tables in our salon which proved that the concept would work, the challenge is making this apparatus modular for all trays on the vessel. More prototypes and concepts need to be developed before an acceptable prototype can be implemented safely on the ship.
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