From Boom Vangs to Bimini
Can nautical terms be a love language?
The Little Dipper showing off her “boot stripe” (a narrow stripe running the length of the hull positioned just above the designated waterline)
There was no other choice, short of an “as is” For Sale sign. Resigned to my fate, I took a deep breath, reached out a shaky hand to the door knob, and stepped bravely into unknown territory: the Prop Shop.
There are plenty of frightening moments in a boater’s life. But few match the chest-tightening anxiety of entering a marine repair shop. A week earlier, as regular readers of this page will remember, I had an unfortunate three a.m. encounter with a gill net buoy in the Little Dipper while chasing northern lights. The buoy won.
I had “spun the prop” as those with more nautical chops than I would say. Repair or replacement were the only options. And so, I found myself in the Prop Shop — a cramped repair bay where all four walls were festooned with propellers of every shape and size, as if you could rev the place up and move it in four directions at once. There were two bladed props, three bladed props, feathering props, each emblazoned with an indecipherable code like hieroglyphics 10 5/8 x 12 & 11 3/8 x 16. There were packages of castle nuts and spacers and cotter pins and tubs of every manner of marine lubricant yet devised by humankind, a whole shop for props. I was overwhelmed, and that was before the door even clicked shut behind me.
When it did, I came face-to-face with the keeper of the lair: the mechanic, that grease-under-the-fingernails, rag-in-the-back-pocket, PhD of props. I have found that in such situations it is best to admit ignorance right from the start. It will be obvious soon enough anyway. So I explained the situation in layman’s terms (the only terms I had) and held on to the gunwales as the professor throttled up into a full-speed dissertation on propeller theory and hydrodynamics. There were chapters on “torque” and “pitch” and “thrust.” There was a complete review of the literature in the fields of “positive pressure and negative pressure” and what I think were some theoretical forays into “advance” and “slip.” I can’t be completely sure.
I can’t be sure because I had pretty much stopped listening after the executive summary. I just wanted a propeller to make the Little Dipper … well, go. The velocity of the terminology being jettisoned by Mr. Prop Shop left me in its wake. My mind took another track, this one a railroad track and the memory of a certain hobo I had met years before.
It was in Butte, Montana. A buddy and I had just read Jack London’s engaging and dangerous book The Road, dangerous because anyone with a pulse who reads it will find themself longing to hop freight trains across the West. And so, we were, yes, hopping freight trains across the West, or trying too. We had no idea which train to “hop” or how one hopped them. After several frustrating and hop-less hours, I steeled up the courage to approach a distinctly hoboesque looking gentleman and inquire as to a means of solving our lingering vexation.
“Well,” said the man through the Brillo pad of his greasy beard and several holes where I assumed teeth used to be, “the double-ought niner is a high-baller goin’ sundown and you can jump the Wheaties.” I thanked him kindly, walked back to my friend and stood silently until he could take it no longer. “What did he say,” my buddy asked fairly bursting with curiosity. I just looked down and admitted “I have no idea.”
Mr. Prop Shop had long since crossed the border into “I have no idea” territory and was showing no signs of making port any time soon, so my mind dragged anchor yet again, this time to the wonderous world of nautical terms, the melodious and colorful language that fills the sails of the boating world and beyond.
A ship’s wheel or “helm” complete with spokes, the barrel, spindles, and more.
True well-weathered nautical types, those mythical characters with permanent sea legs and horizons in their eyes, go about casually dropping terms like “boom vang” (a strap or pulley system used on a sailboat boom to control the shape of the sail) and draft and beam and bow and bilge. To those who can turn a “rope” into a “line” just by bringing it aboard a boat, sailboats “heel” (and the crew “hikes” to compensate). There are “knots” (the kind you tie) — “clove hitch” and “rolling hitch” and “figure eight” and “bowline on a bight” — and “knots” (the kind that measure speed at 1.15 miles an hour per knot). There are “tell tales” (little strings of yarn or sailcloth that monitor the flow of air over the face of a sail) and tack (which as a verb is zig-zagging to make headway into a wind but as a noun denotes your course).
Boats up on cradles are said to be “on the hard” and those being put back into the water are said to “splash.”
The Summer Place “on the hard.”
There are v-bearths and bearings and bites, rub rails and fluke anchors, plow anchors, and fenders, flare, and forepeak. There is starboard, stem, stern, stow, and swamp. Can you even don a jaunty captain’s hat if you don’t know your Bimini (a canvas top) from your BaggyWrinkle (a old scrap of cloth wrapped around rigging to prevent chaffing)? And that doesn’t even raise a spinnaker to all the nautical phrases that sail the seas of our every day language like “in the soup” (thick fog), to “keel over” (turn upside down) or be in the “doldrums” (locked in windless seas). To “deep six” means to toss overboard into deep water (a fathom is approximately six feet) and “by and large” originally referred to a ship’s ability to sail both “into the wind” (by) and “off the wind” (large). To “know the ropes” is to understand the complex system of rigging aboard a sailboat. And as Mr. Prop continued downwind wing-on-wing, it was clear that I did not “know the ropes” when it came to outboard motor propulsion and never would.
A “double-horned cleat”
Yet in time I grew to appreciate the gift I was being given in the grease-tinged light of that repair shop. To speak the language of something you love is a sign of respect. To know your boom vang from your bimini is to care enough to pay attention to the details. It is the pride of precision. Calling a thing by its proper name is not some verbal secret handshake that gains you access to the open bar at the yacht club. It is a sign of knowledge hard-earned, of experience gained with wind in your face and spray over the bow. In that way, I came to realize, nautical terms can be a kind of love language.
When the lungs of Mr. Prop Shop luffed in the tailing winds of time, I thanked him politely and paid for the prop he had chosen for me by some byzantine calculus I was immune to. Then I left, ready to get the Little Dipper off “the hard” and quarter my bow to port, come up on plane, and set a course deep into the islands armed with a brand new prop (10 5/8 x 12) and a full sail lesson in the language of love.
