Sailing Navigation Quotes

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If anyone says that the best life of all is to sail the sea, and then adds that I must not sail upon a sea where shipwrecks are a common occurrence and there are often sudden storms that sweep the helmsman in an adverse direction, I conclude that this man, although he lauds navigation, really forbids me to launch my ship.
Seneca (The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters)
I am a sailor, you're my first mate We signed on together, we coupled our fate Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail For the heart's treasure, together we set sail With no maps to guide us, we steered our own course Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope Working together, we learned how to cope. Life is an ocean and love it a boat In troubled waters it keeps us afloat When we started the voyage there was just me and you Now gathered round us we have our own crew Together we're in this relationship We built it with care to last the whole trip Our true destination's not marked on any chart We're navigating the shores of the heart
John McDermott
Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.
Val Uchendu
But God!Who could live like this , anyway, with the kind of guesswork that was enough to make a person crazy, just sailing along, taking bumps here and there, no course navigated whatsoever, with any big wave capable of just tipping and sinking you entirely. IT was madness, stipidity, and- (then I saw him)
Sarah Dessen
The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.
Michael Meade
In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from "Tale of a Tub", written 1956
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from having navigated through it. Raise your sail and begin.
Gregory S. Williams
What would you have me do? Seek for the patronage of some great man, And like a creeping vine on a tall tree Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? No thank you! Dedicate, as others do, Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon In the vile hope of teasing out a smile On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad For breakfast every morning? Make my knees Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,- Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust? No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right Too proud to know his partner's business, Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire God gave me to burn incense all day long Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you! Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps And licking fingers?-or-to change the form- Navigating with madrigals for oars, My sails full of the sighs of dowagers? No thank you! Publish verses at my own Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint Of a small group of literary souls Who dine together every Tuesday? No I thank you! Shall I labor night and day To build a reputation on one song, And never write another? Shall I find True genius only among Geniuses, Palpitate over little paragraphs, And struggle to insinuate my name In the columns of the Mercury? No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid, Love more to make a visit than a poem, Seek introductions, favors, influences?- No thank you! No, I thank you! And again I thank you!-But... To sing, to laugh, to dream To walk in my own way and be alone, Free, with a voice that means manhood-to cock my hat Where I choose-At a word, a Yes, a No, To fight-or write.To travel any road Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne- Never to make a line I have not heard In my own heart; yet, with all modesty To say:"My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own." So, when I win some triumph, by some chance, Render no share to Caesar-in a word, I am too proud to be a parasite, And if my nature wants the germ that grows Towering to heaven like the mountain pine, Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes- I stand, not high it may be-but alone!
Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac)
No matter what winds others may create against you, you can adjust your sails to navigate and continue your travels.
Jeffrey G. Duarte
One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death.
Zygmunt Bauman (Globalization: The Human Consequences)
Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.
George V. Higgins
To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, “through seas that keel has never cut before.” If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.
José Ortega y Gasset (Man and People (Norton Library (Paperback)))
The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there ... ...when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts)
They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu-wei, which is perhaps best translated as “action without forcing.” It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern)—a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood. As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life-style, tolerant of racial and religious differences, and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of loving.
Alan W. Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown)
Like a horseman who reins in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship's captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas- thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1))
Cyber” comes from the Greek and is related to navigation. When you sail, you must constantly adjust to changes in wind and surf.
Jaron Lanier (Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality)
I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus)
Do not suppose, however, that we are merely a society of lotus-eaters, lolling on divans and cuddling lovely women. Ecstasy is something higher, or further out, than ordinary pleasure, and few hippies realized that its achievement requires a particular discipline and skill that is comparable to the art of sailing. We do not resist the vibrations, pulses, and rhythms of nature, just as the yachtsman does not resist the wind. But he knows how to manage his sails and, therefore, can use the wind to go wherever he wishes. The art of life, as we see it, is navigation.
Alan W. Watts (Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown)
And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The only difference between meditation and non meditation is that when we meditate we are not grasping anything or trying to do anything: instead we are releasing ourselves to our lives, with trust that our lives are all we need. (78)
Norman Fischer (Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls)
You must navigate by means of your own natural compass." "And if my compass is broken?" "Then you must learn to compensate. Sail a little crooked, make adjustments, but you must set your own course, or the journey is meaningless." (page 357)
Kathleen Tessaro (Rare Objects)
If you are bewildered and clinging tenaciously to some course you love, be patient. Work hard. Hold your dream tightly to you, and do everything you can to realize it within reason. Take a step that will lead you toward the realization of your dream, and then take another, and another, and another. Hold fast to your oars, hoist the sails to the wind, read the pictures in the stars, look beyond the horizon to that which you can't see but dimly sense in your future: the curving inlet, the sandy beach.
Jesmyn Ward (Navigate Your Stars)
The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?
Pattiann Rogers (Quickening Fields (Penguin Poets))
In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.
James Carlos Blake (Country of the Bad Wolfes)
tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others.
Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World)
Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142)
Norman Fischer (Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls)
In a Zen retreat we have a format for working with these quicksilver changes: we sit with them, we pay attention to them... Being steady with mindfulness as an anchor for all the changes we go through is the way we practice forbearance. And you can employ this same method anywhere anytime: just pay close attention to the details of what is going on internally and externally. Don't flinch, don't run away. Trust what happens. Take your stand there." (71)
Norman Fischer (Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls)
He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. But his instincts had failed him in the new set of circumstances presented by the murder. Now that the old trusted channel-markers had, so to speak, been rearranged in the dark, the automatic-pilot mechanism by which his psyche navigated was useless; decks awash, he floundered aimlessly, running on sandbars, veering off in all sorts of bizarre directions.
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.
Torre DeRoche (Love with a Chance of Drowning)
The Chinese ideograph for forbearance is a heart with a sword dangling over it, another instance of language's brilliant way of showing us something surprising and important fossilized inside the meaning of a word. Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We all know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all. To practice forbearance is to appreciate and celebrate the heart's vulnerability, and to see that the slicing or piercing of the heart does not require defense; that the heart's vulnerability is a good thing, because wounds can make us more peaceful and more real—if, that is, we are willing to hang on to the leopard of our fear, the serpent of our grief, the boar of our shame without running away or being hurled off. Forbearance is simply holding on steadfastly with whatever it is that unexpectedly arises: not doing anything; not fixing anything (because doing and fixing can be a way to cover up the heart, to leap over the hurt and pain by occupying ourselves with schemes and plans to get rid of it.) Just holding on for hear life. Holding on with what comes is what makes life dear. ...Simply holding on this way may sound passive. Forbearance has a bad reputation in our culture, whose conventional wisdom tells us that we ought to solve problems, fix what's broken, grab what we want, speak out, shake things up, make things happen. And should none of this work out, then we are told we ought to move on, take a new tack, start something else. But this line of thinking only makes sense when we are attempting to gain external satisfaction. It doesn't take into account internal well-being; nor does it engage the deeper questions of who you really are and what makes you truly happy, questions that no one can ignore for long... Insofar as forbearance helps us to embrace transformative energy and allow its magic to work on us... forbearance isn't passive at all. It's a powerfully active spiritual force, (67-70).
Norman Fischer (Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls)
I shall describe one example of this kind of world, the greatest planet of a mighty sun. Situated, if I remember rightly, near the congested heart of the galaxy, this star was born late in galactic history, and it gave birth to planets when already many of the older stars were encrusted with smouldering lava. Owing to the violence of solar radiation its nearer planets had (or will have) stormy climates. On one of them a mollusc-like creature, living in the coastal shallows, acquired a propensity to drift in its boatlike shell on the sea’s surface, thus keeping in touch with its drifting vegetable food. As the ages passed, its shell became better adapted to navigation. Mere drifting was supplemented by means of a crude sail, a membrane extending from the creature’s back. In time this nautiloid type proliferated into a host of species. Some of these remained minute, but some found size advantageous, and developed into living ships. One of these became the intelligent master of this great world. The hull was a rigid, stream-lined vessel, shaped much as the nineteenth-century clipper in her prime, and larger than our largest whale. At the rear a tentacle or fin developed into a rudder, which was sometimes used also as a propeller, like a fish’s tail. But though all these species could navigate under their own power to some extent, their normal means of long-distance locomotion was their great spread of sail. The simple membranes of the ancestral type had become a system of parchment-like sails and bony masts and spars, under voluntary muscular control. Similarity to a ship was increased by the downward-looking eyes, one on each side of the prow. The mainmast-head also bore eyes, for searching the horizon. An organ of magnetic sensitivity in the brain afforded a reliable means of orientation. At the fore end of the vessel were two long manipulatory tentacles, which during locomotion were folded snugly to the flanks. In use they formed a very serviceable pair of arms.
Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker (S.F. MASTERWORKS Book 52))
Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location. The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog's "master", recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite - an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodenstone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth's magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth's core - as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans - is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth's magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
But the worst that the wind did was to be the primary cause of a huge, vicious, boat-flipping, morale-shattering seaway. The helicopter pilots, who, while hovering, had to dodge them, said the waves were as high as fifty feet. If that estimate were true, it still misses the point, for the danger of the waves lay not in their height but in their shape. “At daybreak the seas were spectacular,” remembered Peter Bruce, a commander in the Royal Navy who was navigator in Eclipse. “They had become very large, very steep, and broke awkwardly, but the boat was handling well.” George Tinley, who had been so badly beaten around in his Windswept, later said, “There were seas coming at one angle with breakers on them, but there were seas coming at another angle also with breakers, and then there were the most fearsome things where the two met in the middle.” After the gale, Major Maclean vividly described the appearance of the waves at night: “All around were white horses with their spray flurrying horizontally and slashing against us with the added impetus of the occasional rain squalls. But these white horses were just the top of some monster waves which hunched up, their tops flaring with spume, and marched on leaving us high at one minute so we could glimpse around, and then bringing us some fifty feet down into their troughs so we could appreciate the enormity of the next wave following. Some waves had boiling foam all over them where they were moving through the break of a previous wave, or, when the foam had fizzled away, they were deep green from the disturbance of the water. Otherwise the sea was black.
John Rousmaniere (Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing)
at the moment—and looking for other boats. Kelly advanced the port throttle a notch farther as he turned the wheel, allowing Springer to pivot all the more quickly in the narrow channel, and then he was pointed straight out. He advanced the starboard throttle next, bringing his cruiser to a mannerly five knots as he headed past the ranks of motor and sail yachts. Pam was looking around at the boats, too, mainly aft, and her eyes fixed on the parking lot for a long couple of seconds before she looked forward again, her body relaxing more as she did so. “You know anything about boats?” Kelly asked. “Not much,” she admitted, and for the first time he noticed her accent. “Where you from?” “Texas. How about you?” “Indianapolis, originally, but it’s been a while.” “What’s this?” she asked. Her hands reached out to touch the tattoo on his forearm. “It’s from one of the places I’ve been,” he said. “Not a very nice place.” “Oh, over there.” She understood. “That’s the place.” Kelly nodded matter-of-factly. They were out of the yacht basin now, and he advanced the throttles yet again. “What did you do there?” “Nothing to talk to a lady about,” Kelly replied, looking around from a half-standing position. “What makes you think I’m a lady?” she asked. It caught him short, but he was getting used to it by now. He’d also found that talking to a girl, no matter what the subject, was something that he needed to do. For the first time he answered her smile with one of his own. “Well, it wouldn’t be very nice of me if I assumed that you weren’t.” “I wondered how long it would be before you smiled.” You have a very nice smile, her tone told him. How’s six months grab you? he almost said. Instead he laughed, mainly at himself. That was something else he needed to do. “I’m sorry. Guess I haven’t been very good company.” He turned to look at her again and saw understanding in her eyes. Just a quiet look, very human and feminine, but it shook Kelly. He could feel it happen, and ignored the part of his consciousness that told him that it was something he’d needed badly for months. That was something he didn’t need to hear, especially from himself. Loneliness was bad enough without reflection on its misery. Her hand reached out yet again, ostensibly to stroke the tattoo, but that wasn’t what it was all about. It was amazing how warm her touch was, even under a hot afternoon sun. Perhaps it was a measure of just how cold his life had become. But he had a boat to navigate. There was
Tom Clancy (Without Remorse (John Clark, #1; Jack Ryan Universe, #1))
Michael Lind quotes Frederick Douglas on page 381: “If we had built great ships, sailed around the world, taught the science of navigation, discovered far-off islands, capes and continents, enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge, improved the conditions of man’s existence, brought valuable contributions to art, science, and literature, revealed great truths, organized great States, administered great governments, defined the laws of the universes, formulated systems of mental and moral philosophy, invented railroads, steam engines, mowing machines, sewing machines, taught the sun to take pictures, the lightning to carry messages, we then might claim, not only potential and theoretical equality, but actual and practical equality. Nothing is gained to our cause by claiming more for ourselves than of right we can establish belongs to us.
Michael Lind (The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution)
A highway, a bridge, a navigable canal, for example, may in most cases be both made and maintained by a small toll upon the carriages which make use of them: a harbour, by moderate port-duty upon the tonnage of the shipping which load or unload in it. The coinage, another institution for facilitating commerce, in many countries, not only defrays its own expense, but affords a small revenue or seignorage to the sovereign. The post-office, another institution for the same purpose, over and above defraying its own expense, affords in almost all countries a very considerable revenue to the sovereign. When the carriages which pass over a highway or a bridge, and the lighters which sail upon a navigable canal, pay toll in proportion to their weight or their tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarce possible to invent a more equitable way of maintaining such works.
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. Withfinocchioin fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
What it like to sail?" she asked. His gaze shifted, and he stared into the distance. "It's freedom. Like riding a powerful horse with a gait like silk. You speed over the waves, carried on the wind, held up over an unknowable depth of water beneath you, with the entire sky above. And that sky is a different color depending on where on earth you are. There are a thousand shades of blue. You can look up and know where you are, just by the color. And the stars at night - there's indescribable beauty in the stars, like a woman's eyes, flashing, shining... And yet, they are tools, enabling navigation, a map to follow..." She stared at his profile as he spoke, at the scars that marred his brow and cheeks, the crooked line of his broken nose, the elegant, aristocratic line of his jaw, half-hidden under the shadow of stubble, and the soft, sensual curve of his mouth. She saw the sea in his eyes, smelled the wind, tasted the salt, and she felt her chest tighten with a longing to sail, to experience speed and adventure. Breathless, she felt the presence of the man in the portrait, the rogue, the bold captain. Her heart twisted as she imagined him in prison, beaten, chained, tormented to madness. He was still a prisoner, trapped inside the cage of his injured flesh, his damaged bones, his memories of unspeakable horrors. What would it take to set him free?
Lecia Cornwall (Beauty and the Highland Beast (Highland Fairy Tales #1))
YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafés, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relationships, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel. Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it’s what he said to him, or didn’t say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the bastard up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the passageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes shining like digital wristwatches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!
Margaret Atwood (Good Bones and Simple Murders)
One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.
Jason Rebello (Red Earth Diaries: A Migrant Couple's Backpacking Adventure in Australia)
Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.
Timothy Garton Ash (Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World)
Dad blames it all on his family, who he claims have set records for Scandinavian incompetence since the days of Leif Ericson. While Ericson was discovering Nova Scotia, he says, a dragon boat commanded by one of his own ancestors—they were named Arnulfssen in those days—got lost sailing across the Öresund Strait from Köbenhavn to Malmö, a fifteen-mile stretch of smooth water which could be navigated by a springer spaniel with a mallard in its mouth. He often spoke of Uncle Sven, who couldn’t wave bye-bye until he was eighteen; of his great-grandfather, Gunnar, who was fired from his post of Village Idiot in Viborg because the quality of his work wasn’t high enough; of Aunt Minna, who announced, at the age of twenty-five, that she was tired of speaking Danish because it was “too hard,” and spent the rest of her life not talking at all, just pointing and gesturing and being misunderstood. It seemed
Richard Bradford (Red Sky at Morning: A Novel (Perennial Classics))
Working for a husband and wife ran business is nearly as tricky as navigating a sailing ship while battling the forces of high wind and strong current. It is challenging to work for a husband wife team because they can offset each other’s virtues and magnify their vices.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’90
Richard Holmes (The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science)
In 1469, the regions of Aragon (Aragón) and Castile (Castilla) were united by the marriage of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, thus creating España or Spain. The treasury of this fledgling nation had been depleted by the many battles they had waged against the Moors. The Spanish monarchs, seeing Portugal’s economic success, sought to establish their own trade routes to the Far East. Queen Isabella embraced this concept from the religious standpoint of going out into “all the world” and converting the pagan people of Asia to Christianity. At the same time, a tall, young, middle-class man, said to have come from Genoa, Italy, who held that his father was a fabric weaver and cheese merchant, sought to become a navigator. As such, Columbus sailed to Portugal where pirates allegedly attacked the ship he was on. Fortunately, he managed to swim ashore and joined his brother Bartholomew as a cartographer in Lisbon. Apparently to him, becoming a mapmaker must have seemed boring when there was a world to explore. Returning to the sea, he sailed to places as far away as Iceland to the north, and ventured south as far as Guinea on the West-African coast. It is reasonable to assume that he had heard or perhaps even read the stories about the Vikings that took place almost five hundred years prior to Columbus’ arriving there.
Hank Bracker
Not only scientific theory was condemned as the work of the devil. The devil also seems to have known a lot more about navigation than the bloodthirsty Men of God. Many (perhaps most) ships sailing the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages had Jewish navigators, for the Christian captains and crews were not supposed to meddle with the devilish science of mathematics. In the 10th century, Raud the Strong, a Viking chieftain, escaped the fanatical Christianizing king of Norway Olaf Trygvasson by sailing into the wind (i.e., maintaining a zig-zag course whose average advances against the wind); the pious king, who was better acquainted with witchcraft than with the triangle of forces, thereupon accused Raud of being in alliance with the devil, and when he finally caught him, he had him killed by stuffing a viper down his throat.
Petr Beckman (A History of Pi)
It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of “writings on stones from before the flood,” turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt. Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]’s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”--and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster--a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...]-- overtook this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to “wander” the world. [...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled “channel” surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones--a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as “Poseidon,” was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection. Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timaeus, as a prelude to his account of the lost civilization and its demise, he reports that the Egyptian priests from whom Solon received the story began by speaking of a celestial cataclysm: “There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them being by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own [i.e. the Greeks’] story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burned up things on earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth.
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
The definition for the “Poop Deck” as found in nautical books would lead you to believe that the name was derived from the French word for the stern of the ship, la poupe which in turn was derived from the Latin puppis. On sailing ships this deck was higher than the main deck, making it ideal to navigate from. It also was where the binnacle and ship’s wheel were located for the helmsman. The deck of the poop deck formed the roof or overhead of the Captain’s cabin making it convenient for the Captain to reach. His after cabin was frequently irreverently referred to as the “poop cabin!” As wooden ships with iron men were replace with wooden men on iron ships, the navigational functions, with the exception of setting the sails, were moved to the bridge. According to my father who was a ship’s cook in the early 1920’s, the term poop deck remained, but took on a totally different meaning. During the turn of the last century, with coal fired reciprocating steam engines replacing wind and sails, this rear deck was where animals were kept to be butchered for food. Salted meat packed in barrels and the lack of fresh vegetables was the frequent cause of constipation and even worse scurvy. Many ships of that era, and before, didn’t yet have refrigeration and this was the way they continued to have fresh meat. A cabin boy tended to the chickens, pigs, lambs and goats and it was up to the butcher or cooks to slaughter and quarter them. Of course the deck nearest the stern was ideal for this, leaving the ensuing smell behind in the wake of the ship. Seldom is the term “Poop Deck” used now since with the advent of cruise ships nautical terms are fading. Bunks have become beds, cabins became staterooms and the head is now the restroom. Oh, what has become of the days of yore?
Hank Bracker
Despite the passage of close to a million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called Polynesian expansion. And the mainstream historical view is that the Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492--the year in which, as the schoolyard mnemonic has it, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology--a reference frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
Getting It Right" Your ankles make me want to party, want to sit and beg and roll over under a pair of riding boots with your ankles hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather; they make me wish it was my birthday so I could blow out their candles, have them hung over my shoulders like two bags full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines but smaller and lighter and sexier than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge; they make me want to sing, make me want to take them home and feed them pasta, I want to punish them for being bad and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling, it will never happen again, not in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be hurled into the air like a cannonball and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van. Your thighs are two boats burned out of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them under the blue denim of your high-end jeans, could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry. Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills. Your ass is a string quartet, the northern lights tucked tightly into bed between a high-count-of-cotton sheets. Your back is the back of a river full of fish; I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word. Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone, a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions. I am navigating the North and South of it. Your armpits are beehives, they make me want to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey, their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark. I am bright yellow for them. I am always thinking about them, resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms of blue and ice with the blood running to make them believe in God. Your shoulders make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse. Each is a separate bowl of rice steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet and a throaty elevator made of light. Your neck is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven. It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth, which opens like the legs of astronauts who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one voting districts of the Milky Way. Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right! Matthew Dickman, The New Yorker: Poems | August 29, 2011 Issue
Matthew Dickman
If the line is 50 ft long and it takes 10 seconds to tow it, your boat speed is 0.6 times 50 divided by 10, or 3.0 kts.
David Burch (Inland and Coastal Navigation: For Power-driven and Sailing Vessels)
Life is not as easy as it sounds. It is about sailing troubled waters, navigating unprecedented times, and carving new paths.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Extensive Philosophy of Life: Daily Quotes)
Life is not as easy as it sounds. It is about sailing troubled waters, navigating unprecedented times and carving new paths.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Philosophy of an African Child: A Compendium of Quotes)
Life is not as easy as it sounds. It is about sailing troubled waters, navigating unprecedented times. and carving new paths.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Extensive Philosophy of Life: Daily Quotes)
Asteria’s Ship’s Library Sailing Books Admiralty, NP 136, Ocean Passages of the World, 1973 (1895).  Admiralty, NP 303 / AP 3270, Rapid Sight Reduction Tables for Navigation Vol 1 & Vol 2 & Vol3. Admiralty, The Nautical Almanac 2018 & 2019. Errol Bruce: Deep Sea Sailing, 1954. K. Adlard Coles: Heavy Weather Sailing, 1967. Tom Cunliffe: Celestial Navigation, 1989. Andrew Evans: Single Handed Sailing, 2015. Rob James: Ocean Sailing, 1980. Robin Knox-Johnston: A World of my Own, 1969. Robin Knox-Johnston: On Seamanship & Seafaring, 2018. Bernard Moitessier: The Long Route, 1971. Hal Roth: Handling Storms at Sea, 2009. Spike Briggs & Campbell Mackenzie: Skipper's Medical Emergency Handbook, 2015 Essays Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, 1955. Biographies Pamela Eriksson: The Duchess, 1958. Olaf Harken: Fun Times in Boats, Blocks & Business, 2015. Martti Häikiö: VA Koskenniemi 1–2, 2009. Eino Koivistoinen: Gustaf Erikson – King of Sailing Ships, 1981. Erik Tawaststjerna: Jean Sibelius 1–5, 1989. Novels Ingmar Bergman: The Best Intentions, 1991. Bo Carpelan: Axel, 1986. Joseph Conrad: The End of the Tether, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Youth and Other Stories 1898–1910.  Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, 1900. James Joyce: Ulysses, 1922, (translation Pentti Saarikoski 1982). Volter Kilpi: In the Alastalo Hall I – II, 1933. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks, 1925. Harry Martinson: The Road, 1948. Hjalmar Nortamo: Collected Works, 1938. Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time 1–10, 1922. Poems Aaro Hellaakoski: Collected Poems. Homer: Odysseus, c. 700 BC (translation Otto Manninen). Harry Martinson: Aniara, 1956. Lauri Viita: Collected Poems. Music Classic Jean Sibelius Sergei Rachmaninov Sergei Prokofiev Gustav Mahler Franz Schubert Giuseppe Verdi Mozart Carl Orff Richard Strauss Edvard Grieg Max Bruch Jazz Ben Webster Thelonius Monk Oscar Peterson Miles Davis Keith Jarrett Errol Garner Dizzy Gillespie & Benny Dave Brubeck Stan Getz Charlie Parker Ella Fitzgerald John Coltrane Other Ibrahim Ferrer, Buena Vista Social Club Jobim & Gilberto, Eric Clapton Carlos Santana Bob Dylan John Lennon Beatles Sting Rolling Stones Dire Straits Mark Knopfler Moody Blues Pink Floyd Jim Morrison The Doors Procol Harum Leonard Cohen Led Zeppelin Kim Carnes Jacques Brel Yves Montand Edit Piaf
Tapio Lehtinen (On a Belt of Foaming Seas: Sailing Solo Around the World via the Three Great Capes in the 2018 Golden Globe Race)
What these creative professionals understand is that focus not only requires keeping distraction out; it also necessitates keeping ourselves in. After we’ve learned to master internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers, the last step to becoming indistractable involves preventing ourselves from sliding into distraction. To do so, we must learn a powerful technique called a “precommitment,” which involves removing a future choice in order to overcome our impulsivity. Although researchers are still studying why it is so effective, precommitment is, in fact, an age-old tactic. Perhaps the most iconic precommitment in history appears in the ancient telling of the Odyssey. In the story, Ulysses must sail his ship and crew past the land of the Sirens, who sing a bewitching song known to draw sailors to their shores. When sailors approach, they wreck their ships on the Sirens’ rocky coast and perish. Knowing the danger ahead, Ulysses hatches a clever plan to avoid this fate. He orders his men to fill their ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the Sirens’ call. Everyone follows Ulysses’s orders, with the exception of Ulysses, who wants to hear the beautiful song for himself. But Ulysses knows that he will be tempted to either steer his ship toward the rocks or jump into the sea to reach the Sirens. To safeguard himself and his men, he instructs his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship and instructs them not to set him free nor change course until the ship is in the clear, no matter what he says or does. The crew follows Ulysses’s commands, and as the ship passes the Sirens’ shores, he is driven temporarily insane by their song. In an angry rage, he calls for his men to let him go, but since they cannot hear the Sirens nor their captain, they navigate past the danger safely.
Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
Some years ago I was on holiday on the Island of Jura. While there I had the use of a very fine sailing boat. One day, with my daughter, I sailed past a lighthouse that seemed to stand erect out of the ocean. It being high tide the rock on which it was built was covered. While passing, the thought occurred to me, “that lighthouse could be as treacherous as the rock on which it was built, but for the light.” It was the light that made the difference. The structure was perfect and the building the work of a master – but a positive danger to navigation apart from the light! Is the lighthouse a far-fetched comparison, or do I see in it a representation of the institution we call the Church and the vocation we call the Ministry – without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, a positive danger in the community; with the anointing, giving direction because men see God?
Duncan C. Campbell (Revival in the Hebrides)
FROM OTHER SOURCES Pre–race and Venue Homework Get hold of any history of past events at the venue, plus any information that the conducting club may have about weather and expected conditions. Go to the weather bureau and get history for the area. Speak to sailors from your class who have this venue as their home club or who have sailed there on a number of occasions. Boat, Sails, Gear Preparation Checklist Many times the outcome of a race is as dependent on what you have done prior to the race as to what you do out on the course. Sometimes no matter how good your tactics and strategy are a simple breakage could render all that useless. Hull – make sure that your hull is well sanded and polished, centreboard strips are in good condition, venturis if fitted are working efficiently, buoyancy tanks are dry and there are no extraneous pieces of kit in your boat which adds unwanted weight. Update any gear that looks tired or worn especially control lines. Mast, boom and poles – check that all halyards, stays and trapeze wires are not worn or damaged and that pins are secure, knots tight and that anything that can tear a sail or injure flesh is taped. Mark the full hoist position on all halyards. Deck hardware – check all cam cleats for spring tension and tape anything that may cause a sail tear or cut legs hands and arms. Check the length of all sheets and control lines and shorten anything that is too long. This not only reduces weight but also minimises clutter. Have marks on sheets and stick or draw numbers and reference scales for the jib tracks, outhaul and halyards so that you can easily duplicate settings that you know are fast in various conditions. Centreboard and rudder – ensure that all nicks and gouges are filled and sanded and the surfaces are polished and most importantly that rudder safety clips are working. Sails – select the correct battens for the day’s forecast. Write on the deck, with a china graph pencil, things like the starting sequence, courses, tide times and anything else that will remind you to sail fast. Tools and spares – carry a shackle key with screwdriver head on your person along with some spare shackles and short lengths of rope or different diameters. A tool like a Leatherman can be very useful to deal with unexpected breakages that can occur even in the best prepared boat.
Brett Bowden (Sailing To Win: Guaranteed Winning Strategies To Navigate From The Back To The Front Of The Fleet)
The earliest blacks to arrive in North America were not the shackled Africans who were forced to migrate from Africa to the New World during the journey called the Middle Passage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the first Africans or people of African descent to step foot on the American continent were navigators, translators, and other seamen who worked aboard European ships during the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century. Some who sailed were free, while other were enslaved.
Linda Tarrant-Reid (Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century)
He helps me navigate a course of healing just like I use my instruments to navigate a safe sailing course on the vast sea.
Kathleen Banicki
I like things clear. That’s why I like sailing. What the ocean wants, the ocean gets. And if you feel the need to be absolutely right about something, you can polish your navigation. You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it’ll still kill you; but if you’re a good navigator, at least you’ll know where you were when you died.
Justin Scott (The Shipkiller)
The Earth is Round! Nothing, other than perhaps our universe, started in a vacuum and neither did the discovery of the Americas, which of course included the island of Cuba. Why did Columbus want to sail for parts unknown? What was going through his mind when he turned his small fleet of three ships in a westerly direction and headed towards the edge of the world? Surely, he didn’t have a death wish, so what was it that he knew that the rest of the 15th century world didn’t? Scholars recalled that there had been a grand library in Alexandria, Egypt, that contained as many as 500,000 scrolls. These were the records of human endeavors, and the shared knowledge known to the people of that era. Many of these scrolls concerned themselves with science, history and the earthly wisdom that scholars wanted to share with others. Unfortunately, everything in the library was lost, when this magnificent structure burned to the ground in 48 BC however educated people still had a better understanding of Earth and their surroundings than we give them credit for. It was a fact that many did know that the Earth was round and speculated that navigators could sail west and arrive in the Far East!
Hank Bracker
First time on a sailboat?” she asked, as casually as if she wasn’t standing there, gripping the wheel of a sleek, forty-foot sailing vessel while looking like sex candy on a stick. “First time on any boat,” he told her. She turned that smile on him again, and his body leaped to attention, while his mind leaped to wondering just what it was she had in mind. Looks might be deceiving. But he was beginning to hope they weren’t. “Looks like you’ll be getting a few firsts this afternoon, then.” With that little bombshell dropped, she calmly looked back to the water as she navigated the boat away from the pier and through the other vessels tied up along the maze of docks and piers, some of them sailboats but more of them working ones. With nothing else to do, and fairly certain if he stared at her in that tropical print napkin any longer he’d simply lunge at her, he made his way over to the picnic basket and cooler and stowed both in one of the big storage bins Thomas had showed him earlier.
Donna Kauffman (Starfish Moon (Brides of Blueberry Cove, #3))
Upon arriving at Annandale’s luxuriously appointed London house, Christopher was shown to the library, where a fire had been lit in the hearth despite the fact that it was the height of summer. "Good God, Grandfather,” he said, nearly recoiling at the blast of heat as he entered the library. “You’ll have us braised like a pair of game hens." Striding to the window, he flung it open and drew in a breath of outside air. “You could easily heat yourself with a walk out-of-doors.” His grandfather scowled at him from a chair beside the hearth. “The doctor has advised against outside air. I would advise you to negotiate your inheritance before you try to finish me off.” “There’s nothing to negotiate. Leave me whatever you wish--or nothing, if it pleases you.” “Manipulative as always,” Annandale muttered. “You assume I’ll do the reverse of whatever you say.” Christopher smiled and shrugged out of his coat. He tossed it to a nearby chair as he approached his grandfather. He went to shake his hand, enclosing the frail and cold fingers in his own warm grasp. “Hello, sir. You’re looking well.” “I am not well,” Annandale retorted. “I’m old. Navigating life with this body is like trying to sail a shipwreck.
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
If you looking for Rafting Company in Rishikesh? Then we are the people to call because we have it all. If you are looking for camping in Rishikesh, adventure, fun, anticipation and family bonding then your one weekend with us is awaiting. As in this weekend we give you all kind of rafting in Rishikesh like river rafting, bungee jumping and trekking, if you are the daring kind. And you can dare to paint the town red then paintball is your thing. Diffidence prevents us from audacity, but we do have the best camps for hosting your family weekends. So what are you coming up for Pack your bags as Uttarakhand Adventure is calling. If adventure runs from side to side your veins and you dare to ride high on the wild waters of the Ganga then head to Rishikesh for a rejuvenate and exciting holiday journey. Revitalize your drained body and mind in the good-looking surroundings of this holy town and let the thrill of white water rafting take you absent from the rest of the world. Offering a synthesis of chilly conditions and gorgeous sand beaches with Garhwal Himalaya Mountains in the background, Rishikesh is one of the most important rafting destinations in India. It is a place that continues to strike the thoughts of city dwellers who want to escape from their work routine and droning lifestyle. The best element of river rafting company in Rishikesh is that it can be enjoyed by anyone; you don’t need to be a swimmer or a specialized rafter to enjoy this sport. The strong present of the Ganga flowing down from a very high height through the Himalayan Mountain Range makes it one of the best rivers in India to enjoy rafting adventure. Wash away your fears and go in front and sail crossways the river awash with demanding whirlpools and rapids. If you manage to successfully man oeuvre through the stretch with little help from the guide, you positively deserve a pat on your back for your skirmishing spirit. Most of river rafting packages in Rishikesh are incomplete without experiencing the rustic charm of beach camping under the open sky. The best instance for white water rafting in Rishikesh is from February to May and as of September to November. River Rafting is best enjoyed in the consecrated valley of Rishikesh which boasts of the Great Ganges River downward with an ultimate force and existing precisely as the originator intended her to be- Wild and Free. The attendance of numerous rapids and troughs along the make bigger of the river fortifies the stand of Rishikesh as the River Rafting capital of India. Once here; you will be given a crash course on the sport, its navigational technique, and how to make it safer. Following the briefing, the organizers will hand you gear like rafts, paddles, helmets and life jackets.
uttarakhand adventure
Now walking out onto the upper deck to find Minerva sailing steadily eastward on calm seas, Daniel is appalled that anyone ever doubted these matters. The horizon is a perfect line. The sun a red circle tracing a neat path through the sky and proceeding through an orderly series of color changes: red, yellow, white. Thus nature. Minerva, the human world, is a family of curves. There are no straight lines here. The decks are slightly arched, to shed water and supply greater strength. The masts flexed, impelled by the thrust of the sails, but restrained by webs of rigging, curved grids like Isaac’s sundial lines. Of course, wherever wind collects in a sail or water skims around the hull, it follows rules that Bernoulli has set down using the calculus, Leibniz’s version. Minerva is a congregation of Leibniz curves, navigating according to Bernoulli rules, across a vast mostly water-covered sphere whose size, precise shape, trajectory through the heavens and destiny were all laid down by Newton.
Neal Stephenson
If I may be permitted the indulgence of another of my favourite pictures, it is that of a seaside bay. With a small boat, and the tide low, one has to be extremely careful not to strike barely submerged rocks, and has to navigate with caution among the visible obstructions. The situation is by no means carefree; it could be damaging to one’s craft, even dangerous to one’s person.Yet, a few hours later, with a full tide, the whole scene is transformed. The menacing rocks are now at least several feet below one’s keel, and one may sail freely within the area. This has more than incidental parallels with James C. Thomson’s concept, which he named High Level Health. Not mere absence or avoidance of uncomfortable symptoms, but a genuine freedom to live and move fully
C. Leslie Thomson
Sir George Somers, an experienced mariner, was put in charge of the fleet. Roughly sixty years of age, Somers, from the town of Lyme on England’s southwest coast, had a resume that included service under Essex, Sir Francis Drake, and the privateering Sir John Hawkins.30 A member of parliament, he was an accomplished mariner and navigator. His second in command as master of the fleet’s flagship was Captain Christopher Newport, whose maritime pedigree was every bit as impressive as Somers’s. About forty-nine years of age in 1609, Newport had gone to sea as a young man, sailing to South America and the Caribbean as a privateer. In 1590, when he was about thirty years of age, Newport had been in a sea battle with two Spanish treasure ships off the coast of Cuba. In that battle, Newport lost his right arm but persevered. For the next thirteen years, he was an active Caribbean privateer and was a leading participant in the capture, in 1592, of the Spanish treasure ship the Madre de Dios, a prize that carried about half a million pounds in gems, spices, silks, and other goods. Newport’s long experience as a privateer helped him establish strong links with English merchants. He was also known to King James I, having presented the monarch with two live crocodiles and a wild boar following one of his New World voyages. In 1606, he was named commander of the first Virginia expedition and sailed as captain of the Susan Constant, flagship of the first Virginia fleet.31 By the time he was named sailing master of the flagship of the 1609 fleet, he had made three crossings between England and Jamestown.
Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
If Captain Cook was not the first of European navigators to discover the Hawaiian Islands, he was at least the first to chart and make their existence known to the world. It has been pretty satisfactorily established that Juan Gaetano, the captain of a Spanish galleon sailing from the Mexican coast to the Spice Islands, discovered the group as early as 1555. But he did not make his discovery known at the time, and the existence of an old manuscript chart in the archives of the Spanish government is all that remains to attest his claim to it.
David Kalākaua (Legends & Myths of Hawaii)
The great teachers of our historical culture insist that morality is deeper and more substantial than effervescent foam. It stands to reason, they insist, that where there are waves and foam there is a deeper body of water. These sources describe a sea of substantial morality that lies beneath the ephemeral and ever-changing surface expressions of emotion, taste, and satisfaction in ordinary human intercourse. They describe character as the gravity that keeps us afloat and virtues as the sails that propel us and the instruments that help us to maintain our course, even when the ship is being rocked by stormy waters and high seas. Sailors need to know when to use ballast or throw down the anchor, lest the ship sink and they drown. In like manner, the virtues enable us to respond correctly to those moments of life that are the moral equivalents to such conditions at sea. However, an ability to discern these moments and respond appropriately entails more than formal techniques of decision-making, just as successful sailing requires that one know more than just the techniques of good navigation. As the latter requires a knowledge of and familiarity with the sea that cannot be taught in books but can only be learned from seafaring itself, so the moral life requires that we be virtuous. The virtues are not just the moral equivalent of techniques of good sailing; rather, they are the way as well as the end of goodness and happiness. If we assume, however, as so many of the textbooks would have believe, that problems and quandaries are the whole subject matter of ethics and that the decisions we make are the purpose of morality, then we are likely to interpret even the virtues in the same superficial, utilitarian way in which we already think of values. But if we pay heed to the ancient sources, we will recognize that the virtues are related to a much thicker and deeper moral reality. We will see the virtues as the qualities of character that we need in order to steer our way through the complicated and mysterious sea of morality into which we all have been placed. For such journeying, a pocketful of values is neither sufficient ballast nor a substitute for sails, compass, or sextant.
Vigen Guroian (Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination)
Like a ship on the seas, individually we all must set our sails and find our own awareness to navigate and guide ourselves on our journeys. And with any journey we must find, explore, and expand the depth of our roots and the horizon of where and how we wish to grow.
Gwen Juvenal (Our New Story: Guides in the Garden Volume 1)
Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death. VAL UCHENDU
Preston Ulmer (The Doubters' Club: Good-Faith Conversations with Skeptics, Atheists, and the Spiritually Wounded)
Work smart and adapt to changes that come your way. Like the captain of a ship, learn how to navigate and adjust the sails according to the wind and the waves.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
What has been missed out here is that the Indian traders of eastern India have discovered the Monsoon patterns many centuries before Hippalus. It was their knowledge of the wind patterns in the Eastern Sea that helped them navigate to Southeast Asia with the retreating Monsoon in late October and sail back to India with the advancing Monsoon in May. The event of starting off the sea voyage is still symbolically celebrated in Odisha as the festival of Bali Jatra (voyage to Bali). The festival is celebrated on the full moon of the Hindu month of Kartik (fifteen days after Diwali).
Vijender Sharma (Essays on Indic History (Lesser Known History of India Book 1))
The Cryptic Sea by Stewart Stafford Walk free through Jailer's Gate, Sail to where corporeal forms fade, No longer seen as a common cutpurse, Now in a navigational cut-and-thrust. Note how the ocean heaves and boils, Swirling into towering vortex coils, With hideous creatures at every base, Bearing the haunting Kraken's face. Great ghost ships groan from the mist, And balls of light form fast betwixt, The horizon and the sea spray foam, Save us all and set sail for home. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
The surface of the Mediterranean is lower than the Atlantic by as much as twenty centimeters, a declivity created by prevailing winds and the rapid evaporation of this warm salty lake between Europe and Africa. The effect is most noticeable at the Strait of Gibraltar, where surface currents run steadily eastward in a flow that peaks at each high tide, like the slow pulsing of blood in some great aorta. Combined with the vendaval, this is today making our navigational goal feel a bit like digging a tunnel with a spoon. A light wind develops from the north, at first a gentle exhalation and before long enough to ruffle the sea surface and raise the occasional crest of foam. We shut down our engine and set sail, exulting in the sudden silence.
Elliot Rappaport (Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships)
Navigating healthcare's future without data is like sailing without stars.
Alcir Santos Neto
The journey of scaling your business is akin to navigating the seas of possibility; it requires courage to sail away from the safe harbor of the known, driven by the winds of ambition and guided by the stars of your vision.
Lucas D. Shallua
The mantle of progress shifted, however, in the early modern period as a result of two great maritime expeditions that took place at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of six years in the 1490s, the foundations were laid for a major disruption to the rhythm of long-established systems of exchange. First Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, paving the way for two great land masses that were hitherto untouched to connect to Europe and beyond; then, just a few years later, Vasco da Gama successfully navigated the southern tip of Africa, sailing on to India, opening new sea routes in the process. The discoveries changed patterns of interaction and trade, and effected a remarkable change in the world’s political and economic centre of gravity. Suddenly, western Europe was transformed from its position as a regional backwater into the fulcrum of a sprawling communication, transportation and trading system: at a stroke, it became the new mid-point between east and west.
Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
Time,” said Nimue, “has neither a beginning nor an end. Time is like the serpent Ouroboros, which bites its own tail with its teeth. Eternity is hidden in every moment. And eternity consists of the moments that create it. Eternity is an archipelago of moments. You may sail through that archipelago, although navigation is very difficult, and it is dangerous to get lost. It’s good to have a lighthouse whose light can guide you. It’s good to be able to hear someone calling among the fog…” She fell silent for a while.
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Lady of the Lake (The Witcher, #5))
Amidst the tempestuous sea of distractions, our dreams reside, like a distant lighthouse, steadfast and patient. They wait for us to navigate the storm, to steer our ship through the crashing waves and reach the tranquility of focused intent. The challenge, therefore, is not to calm the sea, but to become skilled mariners, to learn to sail even in the fiercest storm.
Kevin L. Michel (The Power of the Present: A Stoic's Guide to Unyielding Focus)
Integrity is the lighthouse of character, standing tall in the tempests of temptation, and beckoning all who sail the seas of life to navigate by the unwavering light of honesty and principle.
Samuel Asumadu-Sarkodie
Finite Navigation by Stewart Stafford Happiness is but a harbour in a storm; Greater tempests lash far-off docks, Gauntlets to run to the last port of call, Never a permanent plateau of nirvana. Life's weather patterns pivot and feint, Everything beyond our fingertip reach, If we go off course with coins on our eyes, The rocks of avarice pace in ocean spray. We set sail or get driven from our sanctuary, Shelter granted at the behest of strangers, Captains of our ship, La Mirage, wave dancing, Mates and blood as crew, fish and fowl companions. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
...an incisive, smartly informative memoir that celebrates the power of the cohesive family unit—its outcome will offer positivity and hope to those facing similar challenges. —KIRKUS REVIEWS Deep Waters is a survival story of the highest order, navigating the complex terrain of marriage, medical crisis, and a future reimagined. After the trauma of her husband’s stroke, Mathews returns to a basic truth: through love, we discover who we are, and who we hope to become. —CAROLINE VAN HEMERT, award-winning author of The Sun is a Compass Mathews has penned a deeply personal love story with the careful rigor of the scientist she is, free of any giddy prose or rainbows. Instead, Deep Waters comes at the reader with the gloves off and goes a full twelve rounds, documenting in granular detail the fears and conflicts attending a life-altering event that can drive even a strong relationship onto the ropes, and the endurance, commitment, and deep love that can save it. —LYNN SCHOOLER, critically acclaimed author of The Blue Bear and Walking Home With love as rugged and wild as the Alaskan landscape she made home, biologist Beth Ann Mathews tells the story of another wilderness: marriage after a life-altering stroke. Deep Waters is a thoughtful and provoking read, a reminder that life and love are inexplicably fragile and resilient, full of unexpected discovery. —ABBY MASLIN, author of Love You Hard Urgent, informative, emotionally satisfying, and thought-provoking, Deep Waters opens with a harrowing medical mystery and rewards the reader with a loving account of an adventurous partnership made stronger by crisis. —ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX, author of Annie and the Wolves We felt like we were there with Beth, sharing her emotions, anguish and struggles through the stroke, hospital stay, and recovery. We felt like part of the family as we read, gasped, cried and hoped for recovery and for peace in her heart.”—TBD BOOK CLUB, Seattle, WA If books were birds, this one would be an arctic tern—powerful and graceful, beset by storms and learning to survive, and more, to thrive. The writing is feather-light yet strong. —KIM HEACOX, author of Jimmy Bluefeather Mathews writes with poignant honesty about the challenges of marriage, family, and community in a moving story that highlights the strengths of human relationships. Deep Waters starts with a bang and just keeps going—lively, vivid, and personal. — ROMAN DIAL, author of The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir
Beth Ann Mathews (Deep Waters: A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled)
Cannons and Cannons Alone You’re a born gunner. You can make the bronze and cast iron of a cannon sing. Your place is here, on the cannon deck. You see no reason to go up on the top deck unless strictly necessary. Sails just don’t interest you. Constantly rolling heavy cannons has enhanced your musculature (+5 Strength), but your Navigation skill will never improve again. Ever.
Igor Knox (Isle of Destiny (A Buccaneer's Due #1))
I imagine a boy cut adrift, navigating choppy seas. Where is home in your early twenties? A distant blip on the horizon, the place you left, perceived as a failure to return. Instead, you’ve set sail into infinite possibility, eager to make your own way, only to find yourself lost, clutching at a broken compass, with the realization that there never was any real destination to begin with.
Lauren Nossett
In one version, the voyage is recounted, as in the stories of Pele and Ru, as a series of island stops within the Marquesan archipelago. But in another it is described as a series of legs, each defined by the appearance of a star in the sky who challenges the voyagers with a question about their identity. Only when they give the correct answer—“We are Pepeu and Utunui, Mahaitivi’s boys, like the wind, like the wind we glide behind the sky, our hair darts into the air, we go to Aotona”—does the star permit them to move on. This idea of sailing under a series of stars perfectly matches the concept of a star path—a sequence of stars rising at roughly the same point on the horizon, each of which is used, in turn, to maintain a constant heading—one of the presumed techniques of ancient Polynesian navigation.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Now, girl, do you remember yesterday’s lesson? How shall we trim the sails for a steady wind coming in off the starboard quarter, abaft?” Abaft? Auli-Ambar turned the delightfully anachronistic word over in her mind. These Dragonship Steersmen used the very best words, possessing a unique language of their own to describe navigation, flying, the tying of knots and the multitudinous parts and workings of their vessels. They sailed or made headway above the depthless Cloudlands, tacked against the wind, unpicked knots with marlinspikes, and their enemies were called pirates or corsairs. Who even knew what a marlin was?
Marc Secchia (The Dragon Librarian (Scrolls of Fire, #1))
Likewise, she figured that the large, flat end of the paddle would be adequate enough to propel them through the water. She would have preferred a sail to navigate the underground winds, but that would have been difficult to make in such limited time, with such threadbare supplies. “It looks good,” she said, handing it back. Then, after a moment, she added, “Thank you.” Takoda looked at the gourd. “I guess we should start packing up the boat.” She heard the sadness in his voice. “Do you want eat first, and then go? We can take a few more minutes—” “No,” he replied. “It would better if we ate while we traveled. No point in wasting any more time.” He walked off toward the boat. Meilin let him go. Takoda was struggling enough with Xanthe’s disappearance as it was, and Meilin didn’t think she had the words to comfort him.
Varian Johnson (The Return (Spirit Animals: Fall of the Beasts, Book 3))
Imitate a little child, whom one sees holding tight with one hand to its father, while with the other it gathers strawberries or blackberries from the wayside hedge. Even so, while you gather and use this world’s goods with one hand, always let the other be fast in your Heavenly Father’s Hand, and look round from time to time to make sure that He is satisfied with what you are doing, at home or abroad. Beware of letting go, under the idea of making or receiving more—if He forsakes you, you will fall to the ground at the first step. When your ordinary work or business is not specially engrossing, let your heart be fixed more on God than on it; and if the work be such as to require your undivided attention, then pause from time to time and look to God, even as navigators who make for the haven they would attain, by looking up at the heavens rather than down upon the deeps on which they sail. So doing, God will work with you, in you, and for you, and your work will be blessed.
Francis de Sales (Introduction to the Devout Life)
Leaving West Africa was bitter sweet. I had made friends the most of which I would never see again. I was seen as an adult in Liberia and for the first time in my life I was accepted as a grown-up. In fact I was given responsibilities I could never have expected had I remained in the United States. As the captain of a coastal vessel I had the same duties as the captain of any ship, large or small and the decisions I made affected the lives of everyone aboard. Although I never gave it much thought the value of the ship and cargo was worth millions of dollars and I was entrusted with it and the lives of the crew and the occasional passengers that sailed with me. When I embarked on this venture I was under the legal age of 21 and signed for everything “under protest.” The skillsets needed to be the captain of a small ship are the same as those needed on a larger vessel only there were less people to do them. Navigation was the same and ship handling without tugboats or thrusters was even more difficult. I did my own piloting, calculated the center of gravity and figured out fuel, water and cargo placement without even the use of a calculator. Computers, GPS, Depth finder, Loran and Radar were thing not yet available for most ships. Since you don’t miss what you never had, life was good and I did what I had to do. Fortunately for the most part everything worked out well. I remember that when I returned to New York and rode in a subway car thinking “Wow, none of these people know that I just returned from West Africa where I was a harbor pilot and the captain of a ship.” The thought that I had accomplished so much at my young age seemed important to me and I thought that it was something they might want to know. The thought that flashed through my mind next brought me back down to earth. “No one would give a shit!” I was back in New York City and would soon be back out to sea….
Hank Bracker
Despite only having a population of around 5000, Interlaken has two stations, West and Ost, at opposite ends of the long main street. They are direct descendants of two Bödelibahn stations, relics of long-forgotten planning that survived because of another oddity: a railway that crosses the River Aare twice between the two stations for no geographical reason. The line could easily run along the south bank without any hindrance, but the planners were sneaky; they could envisage a time when the Aare might be widened in order to create a navigable canal between the two lakes. That would put the steamers in direct competition with their trains, and tourists could simply sail past Interlaken altogether. So they purposefully diverted the new line across the Aare and back again, a double crossing that stopped any such canal plans in their tracks.
Diccon Bewes (Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart)
An Australian social scientist, Jim Macbeth, interviewed dozens of ocean sailors who spend year after year navigating among the islands of the South Pacific, many of them own ing nothing except the boat into which they've invested all their savings. When they run out of money for food or repairs, they stop in a port to do odd jobs until they can replenish their supplies, then they cast off on the next journey. "I was able to throw off responsibility, cast off a humdrum life, be a bit adventurous. I had to do something with life besides vegetate," says one of these modern argonauts. "It was a chance to do one really big thing in my life; big and memorable," says another.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life)
But once you know it, you cannot unknow it. You may lose the calm sea of bliss that ignorance has had you sailing on and be thrust into rough waters you weren’t prepared to navigate.” “If I cannot manage rough seas, then perhaps I am not worthy of the journey.
Christina Tsirkas (The Night Sender)
Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, was the fifth child of King John I. The prince was a responsible ruler and is remembered for developing Portugal’s trade routes with foreign countries, exploring the islands along the central spine of the Atlantic Ocean and sailing along the western coast of Africa in search of new trade routes to the Far East. The 15th century was exciting as well as dangerous. It was a time when exploring meant going to sea and discovering new lands inhabited by many people that were previously unknown to Europeans. The explorations started in about 1418, when two Portuguese ships were inadvertently driven off-course by a storm. The vessels grounded onto the island now known as Porto Santos. The captains, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, who had been commissioned by Prince Henry the Navigator, saw heavy clouds in the distance, under which lay the island of Madeira. Eight years later, Diogo de Silves discovered islands north of Madeira, now known as the Azores.
Hank Bracker
Grand Tourists and their retinues typically crossed the choppy English Channel at the Port of Dover, stepping onto French soil in Calais. From there, the parties would set off on a three-day trek to Paris. Once fitted for new clothes, many proceeded to decamp for a season or longer for their first taste of Continental culture. (...) Not everyone took the same route. The more adventurous traveled from Paris to Lyon then farther south to Marseille, journeying by sea from Marseille to Livorno, in the Tuscany region, or Genoa, although the Italians’ lack of necessary sailing skills at that time made passage risky. Meanwhile, the wary typically trekked from Paris to Lyon then over the Alps. For the latter, Geneva was a subsequent stop, by default rather than preference. Despite the breathtaking beauty of the Alps, coaches—the mode of transport used at the time—simply could not traverse the treacherous Mont Cenis pass, ascending 6,827 feet. Invariably, the harrowing peaks and rocky precipices forced willing travelers to navigate by mule or sled. Regardless of the hassles, those who pressed on reaped extravagant rewards. (...) All roads, however, ultimately led to Rome, befitting its vaunted history as the intellectual, scientific and artistic center of the Renaissance and Baroque culture.
Betty Lou Phillips (The Allure of French & Italian Decor)
We sailed down this magnificent bay with a light wind, the tide, which was running out, carrying us at the rate of four or five knots. It was a fine day; the first of entire sunshine we had had for more than a month. We passed directly under the high cliff on which the presidio is built, and stood into the middle of the bay, from whence we could see small bays making up into the interior, large and beautifully wooded islands, and the mouths of several small rivers. If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water; the extreme fertility of its shores; the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world; and its facilities for navigation, affording the best anchoring-grounds in the whole western coast of America — all fit it for a place of great importance.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast; A Personal Narrative (1911): WITH A SUPPLEMENT BY THE AUTHOR AND INTRODUCTION AND ADDITIONAL CHAPTER BY HIS SON)