A Sea of Woids
A number of you have commented on my pronunciation. It’s a little odd, because I was raised, grades K-5, in Canada. Some vestiges of that a-raisin’ remain, that, and the fact that I have a penchant for the perversely different. So there.
Other times it might seem off because I’m slurring my speech, collapsing vowels into each other or even forgetting entire parts of a word. This is also true. Many of the words sailors use are, in fact, pronounced differently from the way lubbers say them. To wit, a short list:
Leeward: say “loo’rd” or “loo-errd”. The downwind side of something.
Windward: say “wind-errd”. The upwind side of something.
Weather: Can describe the windward side of something. It is also a verb, as in, “Weather that buoy”–meaning, pass the buoy on its weather side.
Tackle: say “tay-kl”. A tackle is the block-and-pulley arrangement that trims our mainsheet, or does other similar heavy lifting. This pronunciation is distinctly Maine; thank you, E.B. White .
A different tack, try a: A tack describes the position of your boat with respect to the wind. A boat might be on either a port tack (wind comes over the port side of the boat) or a starboard tack (wind comes over the starboard side). When making progress along a course, it sometimes happens that one tack is favored. This might be due to irregularities on the helm (say the helmswoman has an easier time steering a particular course on a particular tack) or factors like the current. Not long ago it became clear that whilst beating to windward (we were close-hauled) up the North River that we didn’t fare well on on a port tack. I surmise that the ebb current became stronger as we approached Manhattan. We thus elected to try another tack (starboard, of course) and proceeded to short tack all the way up the river, maximizing our starboard tack time. This flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about the river, namely that the current is generally weaker the closer you get to the edges of the stream. As it happened, it was not weaker. So there you are. We just needed to try another tack.
Wheels a’/to windward!: When we put them helm over to tack, we shout “Helm’s a’lee!” or “Hard a’lee!” The tiller gets put hard over to the leeward side of the boat to push the boat up into and through the eye of the wind. Well, that all works the opposite way when you’re dealing with a wheel: put the wheel to leeward and you’ll wind up gybing. The wheel, unless specially rigged, works just like the wheel on your car: turn right, boat go right. Turn it left, boat go left. Thus, to keep from making those mistakes, the intrepid early-adopters of the wheel cried “Wheels to windward!” in lieu of “Helm’s a’lee!”
