Apr 01 2009
Sailors speak a different language
I don’t have an internet connection where I’m anchored tonight, but being the good captain I am, I planned ahead for this danger on the journey. You see, I want to make sure, that since you take the time to look and read my page, that you will have something new to see at least once a day. So I wrote a few blogs that will explain some of the some terms I use that non-sailors, might or not might be familiar with. This is number 1 of that series.
Sailors speak a different language than land dwellers.
If you take a piece of rope and put it on a flagpole on shore, its still a piece of rope. If you do the same thing aboard a boat the rope becomes a “halyard”. The meaning of the word rope on a boat is ‘material to make lines from’. If you take the rope and attach it to the anchor the line is called a “rode”, attach it to a sail it becomes a “sheet”, attach it to the boom on the mast it becomes a “downhaul”. Attach it to a mooring, piling, or pier it becomes “dock lines”.
But it doesn’t end there, we don’t even judge distance the same. We have fathoms, leagues and nautical miles. A nautical mile is 6080 feet (a statute or land mile is 5280 feet) so 1 nautical mile= 1.15 land miles. A fathom = 6 feet. A side note on fathoms, it was derived from the Old English word “Faethm” which means “embracing arms”. It was defined by an act of Parliament as “the length of a man’s arms around the object of his affection”. Sailors use the term to measure how far it is to the bottom, which is why when your trying to figure something out you are “trying to fathom it” or get to the bottom of it. And a League is three nautical miles.
So here comes the math, Emmanuelle’s hull speed is around 6.5 knots, which means she was designed to travel no faster than around 7.5 mph. That means the farthest I can travel in 10 hours will be 65 nautical miles or 75 miles. that’s possible but not probable. Now because a sailboat depends on wind to move, when planning a trip you assume you will only do half of that, because without a fair wind and following sea you wont reach hull speed. I have been on a sailboat where according to wind speed the boat was going about 3 knots but according to the GPS we were doing .75 knots, backwards, because the current was against us. Which is where the old saying “without patience, a sailor I wouldn’t be”. if I travel 30 miles or 34.5 nautical miles in a 10 hour day, I will feel like I had a good day of cruising. You have to remember, for sailors its not the destination, but the journey.
The way sailors figured the speed before GPS and modern speed indicators was to tie a piece of line to a log and tie a knot in the line every 8 fathoms (48 feet) and then count how many knots the boat passed in a 30 second time frame. If he counted 10 knots in 30seconds, they were traveling at 10 nautical miles an hour, which is just called 10 knots.
I hope to have a signal tomorrow…….
