Avast Ye Scallywags!

"Let's hoist the main and trim the jib!  We're running abeam on a starboard tack!"

Huh!??

Last year, when my husband & I bought a sailboat and set about teaching ourselves to sail, we quickly learned that the first challenge would be to understand the language.  I mean, we'd watched Pirates of the Caribbean and we had picked up a phrase or two - like "Ahoy, me hearties" and "shiver me timbers".   But terms like leach, stanchions, turnbuckles, and spreaders?  Well, blow me down!   

Even words we thought we knew weren't straight-forward.  Like rope.  In nautical terms, a rope is not a rope.  It is a sheet or a halyard or a line.  Unless you remove it from the boat – then it's just a rope again.  Go figure.

We weren't a complete pair of dunces - we knew a little bit before we began.  We knew a kitchen is a galley, a washroom is a head, and a bed a berth.  We even knew that the bow was the front of the boat and the stern the rear, but that's about the extent of our knowledge.  

Little did we know that even common words for directions have alternate nautical terms.  For instance: back is aft, left is port, right is starboard, and up is aloft.  Then there's the terms for the rigging, for navigation, for winds and for the umpteen hundred different knots (although we managed to get by knowing only 3).

With our boat's trusty manual in hand (and the frequent use of a thesaurus) we figured it out and spent a beautiful summer on the water.  Someone once said you can learn to sail in an afternoon, but it takes a lifetime to master it.  So, after one season of sailing we're far from being old salts, but I can proudly say we're no longer landlubbers.   You can figure those words out for yourself.



Putting the Interlude into the water, with some much needed help from the friendly yacht club members



 This is me looking ridiculously happy because we managed to get it launched with "all souls accounted for" (that's nautical for "no one died").

Christening the boat  with some wine for Neptune. 

Side note:  We didn't pour the whole bottle - we're not stupid!  But I did learned that day that there is some skill required to drink wine on a boat without spilling and I can proudly say I mastered that skill very quickly.   I'll be an old salt in no time!