ASTORIA — When instructor Darryl McKnight looks at a full kitchen of students in his galley cook class, he knows that they’ve all got at least one thing in common: They all eat.

And a good thing too, because he’ll use that one shared thread as a starting point.

“If you’ve eaten, you have knowledge of food, and we can expand on that,” McKnight said.

Lately, he has been putting to use his more than 15 years of sea time spent cooking in U.S. Coast Guard cutters, teaching students that have their careers mapped out in front of them. He’s the instructor of Tongue Point Job Corps Center’s new Galley Cook program, and is particularly well-suited to share his first-hand experiences of the highs — and watery lows — of keeping a hardworking crew well-fed at sea.

But McKnight will tell you the young adults in his class have an advantage that he didn’t have when he signed up for the Coast Guard in 1981.

“I’m teaching students who are in a field they want to go into, the seamanship field,” he said. Tongue Point is the only Job Corps Center that teaches seamanship, and so many come to the area just for the program.

But for McKnight, choosing a life at sea was picking a random path to adventure. He’d looked into the other military options, but chose the Coast Guard on a whim.

That chance decision flung him halfway across the planet. After boot camp in Cape May, N.J., McKnight found himself in Italy and Turkey as a seaman.

Still, his memories of those years, and the people he worked alongside, are strong. One man, an Italian cook, left a lasting mark.

“I remember a chef named Guiseppe Napoli and his fresh spaghetti and sauce,” McKnight said. He found himself wandering into the kitchen to help out more and more, and soon, a commanding officer offered to send him to the Coast Guard’s cooking school in Alameda, Calif.

There he completed Culinary Institute of America courses in baking, nutrition and pastry, and got other food service certifications.

His next unit was a cutter, the 180-foot Astoria-based buoy tender Iris, in 1991. And from there, he spent many years in Alaska, working on cutters based in Ketchikan, Seward and Kodiak. His rank kept moving slowly up, from chief petty officer in 2002 to senior chief in 2007.

McKnight’s last unit was the Alameda-based Cutter Morgenthau, and then he decided to retire at the end of 2008 to Warrenton with his wife, Debbie (formerly Godwin) and son, Samuel. Debbie McKnight manages the Coast Guard Exchange in Astoria and has family in the area.

After coming to the area in the winter, it took a little time to find the right job to use Darryl McKnight’s particular skill set. But then he heard about Tongue Point’s new program, and it seemed like a perfect fit.

And now, after the newness of the job has worn off, he’s proud to see just what the students achieved.

“The students are fantastic. They all come in with their own knowledge and desire. They just love to go home and show off what they know,” he said.

Of course, they will not always encounter smooth seas and perfect cooking conditions every time they set out to create meals when on the job. But McKnight makes sure they’re equipped to make the best of even the sloppiest situations. They know they’ll be working for 12 hours a day or more, in the roughest of seas, and cleaning up messes so awful they might just be tempted to throw up themselves, he said.

“Throwing up is not an option,” he said he tells his students. “You try and do your best, even when everything is sliding — port to starboard, port to starboard.

“They’re going to be going into a field where they’ll try to be perfect. But Murphy will always be there to make sure perfect never shows up,” he said with a smile.

He hopes they’ll end up loving the adventure just as much as he did.