I hope your summer is in full swing, gifting you those sunny moments of joy. You know, those precious ones where you get to stop running forward and melt entirely into the present?
For me, over the past decade, most of those moments have taken place on a sailboat. Yet it wasn’t until my forties that I even seriously thought about learning to sail.
I’d always held a vague fantasy of sailing away, but somewhere I’d picked up the idea that one didn’t learn to sail. You had to be born into one of those sailing families. Like you couldn’t decide one day to learn to be a Kennedy. You either were one, or you weren’t.
There seemed to be so many barriers, not the least of which was language. It was like someone had crafted all these mysterious terms purely to act like a secret handshake to keep people out of the club.
Until I started taking lessons, little by little, I came to realize there was a good reason for most of the new terminology.
Ask an assorted group of sailors to head to the port side of a boat, and they’ll all go to the same place. Ask them to head left, and you’ll end up with a bunch of sailors bumping into each other, depending on which way they’re facing.
But other terms that were weird to me then are still weird to me today. I can just use them more effectively in a sentence.
So as I've continued to research this novel about 19th century clipper ships, it’s been a joy to stumble upon historic meanings that—get this—actually make perfect sense.
For example, I’d learned on day one of my first class that a halyard was a line used for raising or lowering a sail, but the strange word itself went unexplained.
For ten years.
Until this past month, when I had one of those hand-to-forehead moments.
Curious?
Most modern sailboats have triangular sails that need only one attachment point at the top. But historically, many ships carried square sails. Every pirate, explorer, and conquistador you can think of used square sails. The Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks sailed with them. There are even a few square-riggers left, still plying the oceans.
And those tall ships use a yard to hold the top of a square sail. Technically, a yard is a horizontal spar, but if that’s too much sailing-ese, think of it as a 2-ton curtain rod and you’ll be in the ballpark.
And if you wanted to raise that yard in the air to catch some wind, well, you had to haul it up there, didn’t you?
Haul Yard >> Halyard
So there you have it.
If you’ve known that for years, please enjoy a good laugh at me for taking ten years to put those two words together. If not, feel free to get all junior high on your sailing friends.
All the best,
Cheyenne
0 comments