All aboard for a culinary adventure

WHEN I asked the captain to tell me the chef's name, he said, ''Foxtrot Romeo Echo Delta'' with a totally straight face. I was puzzled at first. Then it hit me. This was shortwave radio jargon for Fred. It's the way people who fly planes or work on ships talk.

Because the ''captain'' wasn't a head waiter in a restaurant, but Cees Ippel, the burly sea captain of MV Volvox Hollandia, a massive Dutch dredger that's been busily sucking sand out of the South China Sea for the past two years in preparation for the new airport at Chek Lap Kok.

No doubt that life on the Hollandia can be tedious. The dredging machinery never stops working and the ship must continually be on the move. Hoover-like, it methodically creeps along, performing its ceaseless vacuum-cleaner action on the silt-and-mud carpeted sea bottom, day in, day out, 365 days of the year.

The 31-man crew (20 Dutchmen and 10 Filipinos) live on board, taking round-the-clock shifts of eight hours on, eight hours off, for two solid months at a stretch. They work with six or seven other ships of various sizes to remove an Olympic-sized swimming pool amount of matter every minute. The goal is 218 million cubic metres with a mere 32 million to go; the dredgers are ahead of schedule.

With few distractions to amuse them, mealtimes are eagerly anticipated daily events and a major source of nourishment, for body and soul. So it wasn't surprising to hear chef Fred Visser confide: ''The cook is considered to be the Mother of the Ship. Ordering the food supplies, planning the menus, preparing three meals a day, helping to serve, making sure everyone is happy, chatting with the men and providing ''a shoulder or an ear'' whenever something's on their minds.

If the crew doesn't like the food or the cook, he's off the ship. Obviously this is no place for a prima donna. The cook on a dredger has to be part soul-mate, part social director, part diplomat and above all, a creative wizard.