A Boat Is A Hole In The
Water,
Surrounded By Wood,
Into Which,
One Pours Money!
Yes, I am almost finished.
You see, I am almost broke.
If one has to ask the
price, one can not afford it.
- J P Morgan, at a boat show a hundred years ago ...
The Rest ...
A Ship is safe at harbor, but that is not what a ship is for.
The parts of a ship, taken by themselves, would sink. But, when combined, will take you safely, any where you want to go.
Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply
messing about in boats.
- Kenneth Grahame Wind in The Willows
Greatness is not where
we stand, but in what direction we are moving....we must sail, sometimes with
the wind, sometimes against it, but sail we must, and not drift nor lie at
anchor.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Cruisers don't have plans, just intentions.
It is infinitely easier to shake out a reef when one is bored, than it is to try to tie one in when one is scared.
The art of the sailor
is to leave nothing to chance.
- Annie Van De Wiele
The pessimist complains
about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the
sails.
- William Arthur Ward
The only way to get a
good crew is to marry one.
- Eric Hiscock
Only two sailors, in my
experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious
liar.
- Don Bamford
He that will not sail
till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
- Thomas Fuller.
Without patience, a sailor I would never be. -Lee Allred
The sea finds out everything
you did wrong.
- Francis Stokes
I start from the premise
that no object created by man is as satisfying to his body and soul as a proper
sailing yacht.
- Arthur Beiser 1978
When I forget how talented
God is, I look to the sea.
- Whoopi Goldberg
A tourist remains an outsider
throughout his visit; but a sailor is part of the local scene from the monent
he arrives.
- Anne Davison
To young men contemplating
a voyage I'd say go.
- Joshua Slocum
The perfection of a yacht's
beauty is that nothing should be there for only beauty's sake.
- John MacGregor
There are only two colors
to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black.
- Nathanael G Herreshoff
A small craft in an ocean
is, or should be, a benevolent dictatorship.
- Tristan Jones
He was now convinced that
the most valuable sail on board was the diesel.
- Ray Kauffman
It looks like frozen
snot.
- L Francis Herreshoff,
looking at a Herreshoff Bullseye built of fiberglass.
If a man is to be obsessed
by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better
than most.
- E B White
Ships are the nearest
things to dreams that hands have ever made, for somewhere deep in their oaken
hearts the soul of a song is laid.
- Robert N. Rose
If you can't repair it,
maybe it shouldn't be on board.
- Lynn and Larry Pardey
The wonder is always new
that any sane man can be a sailor.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any fool can carry on,
but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
- Joseph Conrad
I know who you are, but
you'll have to wipe your feet.
- Capt. Richard Brown of the schooner America
to Prince Albert of England, 1851
To be successful at sea
we must keep things simple.
- R. D. (Pete) Culler
Land was created to provide
a place for boats to visit.
- Brooks Atkinson
The First Rule For Coastal
Cruising: start early; finish early.
- Anonymous
The humblest craft that
floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.
- Joseph Conrad
It is the weather, not
work, that wears out sails.
- Thomas Fleming Day
A sailing vessel is alive
in a way that no ship with mechanical power ever be.
- Aubrey de Selincourt
No one likes an ugly boat,
however cheap or fast.
- Roger Duncan
You are not going to find
the ideal boat. You are not even going to have it if you design it from scratch.
- Carl Lane
Of all the things that
man has made, none is so full of interest and charm, none possesses so distinct
a life and character of its own, as a ship.
- Henry Van Dyke
Even now; with a thousand
little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting
off.
- E B White
And More ...
If you want to build a ship, don’t
drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead,
teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…
- Antoine de Saint Exupery
“There is nothing — absolutely nothing
— half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of
‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to
matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t;
whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else,
or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never
do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something
else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”
- Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children’s book by Kenneth
Grahame (1859-1932).
A sea captain when he stands upon
the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about
the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may
well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the
kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness
must needs think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supper
with a Captain Moran on board the s.s.
Margaret, that had put into a western river from I know not where. I found
him a man of many notions all flavoured with his
personality, as is the way with sailors. He talked in his queer sea manner
of God and the world, and up through all his words broke the hard energy of
his calling.
– William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
The pessimist complains about the
wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
- William Arthur Ward
I just thank God I don’t live in
a trailer.
- Jimmy Buffet , Son of a son of a sailor
The house was built on the highest
part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It
had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.
- Ernest Hemingway
Sailing is just the bottom line,
like adding up the score in bridge. My real interest is in the tremendous
game of life.
- Dennis Conner
There’s no such thing as bad weather,
only bad clothes.
- Old Norwegian Adage
Any fool can carry on, but a wise
man knows how to shorten sail in time.
- Joseph Conrad
I cannot not sail.
- E. B. White
The lovely thing about cruising is
that planning usually turns out to be of little use.
- Dom Degnon
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting,
and enslaving than the life at sea.
- Joseph Conrad
The days pass happily with me wherever
my ship sails.
- Joshua Slocum
At sea, I learned how little a person
needs, not how much.
- Robin Lee Graham
The cure for anything is saltwater
– sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isak Dinesen
The sea hates a coward.
- Eugene O’Neill
To young men contemplating a voyage
I would say go.
- Joshua Slocum
Boats, like whiskey,
are all good.
- R. D. Culler
Wind is to us what money is to life
on shore.
- Sterling Hayden
I hate storms, but calms undermine
my spirits.
- Bernard Moitessier
Being hove to in a long gale is the
most boring way of being terrified I know.
- Donald Hamilton
The wind and the waves are always
on the side of the ablest navigator.
- Edmund Gibbon
The chance for mistakes is about
equal to the number of crew squared.
- Ted Turner
If you are going to do something,
do it now. Tomorrow is too late.
- Pete Goss
Do or do not. There is no try.
- Yoda
The goal is not to sail the boat,
but rather to help the boat sail herself.
- John Rousmaniere
Prevention is, as in other aspects
of seamanship, better than cure.
- Sir Robin Knox-Johnston
If you can’t repair it, maybe it
shouldn’t be on board.
- Lin and Larry Pardey
I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and the sky. And
all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
- John Masefield
Mackerel skies and mares tails, soon will be time to shorten sails.
- Old sailors proverb.
A sailor’s joys are as simple as
a child’s.
- Bernard Moitessier
“Chaunt
in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.”
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
- W.B. Yeats
…arranging the journey was so difficult.
Getting home again was much easier.
-Thor Heyerdahl (aku-aku)
Man marks the earth with ruin – his
control stops with the shore.
- Byron
…surely these victims of the sea…had
rushed willingly down the hills to the water, only to find themselves caught
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who should judge whether they were there
for the wrong reason?
- John Rousmaniere (Fastnet,
Force 10)
And after two days in civilization
we realized we could never stay for long and started to plan our next adventure.
- Bob Bitchin (Letters from the Lost Soul)
The planning stage of a cruise is
often just as enjoyable as the voyage itself, letting one’s imagination loose
on all kinds of possibilities. Yet translating dreams into reality means a
lot of practical questions have to be answered.
- Jimmy Cornell (World Cruising Handbook)
Twenty years from now you will be
more disppointed by the things that you didn’t do
than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the
safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Discover.
- Mark Twain
If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.
– Motto of a representative of the Winslow Liferaft
Company
There is nothing like lying flat
on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel,
silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship. At
that time you can be equal to Ulysses and brother to him.
- Errol Flynn
Give a man a fish and feed him for
a day. Give him a fishing lesson and he’ll sit in a boat drinking beer every
weekend.
- Alex Blackwell
Don’t worry about the world ending
today. It’s already tomorrow in
- Daria Blackwell
(variation on quote attributed to Charles Schultz’s which references
“Not all who wander are lost.”
– JRR Tolkien
There are three sorts of people;
those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea.
– Old Capstan Chantey attributed to Anacharsis,
6th Century BC
Some years ago – never mind how long
precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular
to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the
watery part of the world.
- H. Melville, Opening Line from Moby Dick
Now – bring me that horizon.
- The last line from Pirates of the
“The pessimist complains about the
wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
-William Arthur Ward
“He that will not sail till all dangers
are over must never put to sea.”
- Thomas Fuller .
“Without patience, a sailor I would
never be.”
-Lee Allred
“The sea finds out everything you
did wrong.”
- Francis Stokes
“I start from the premise that no
object created by man is as satisfying to his body and soul as a proper sailing
yacht.”
- Arthur Beiser 1978, The
Proper Yacht
“He who lets the sea lull him into
a sense of security is in very grave danger.”
-
“It’s out there at sea that you are
really yourself.”
-Vito Dumas
“Whenever your preparations for the
sea are poor; the sea worms its way in and finds the problems.”
- Francis Stokes
“I was born in the breezes, and I
had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else.”
- Joshua Slocum
“When I forget how talented God is,
I look to the sea.”
-Whoopi Goldberg
“ A tourist
remains an outsider throughout his visit; but a sailor is part of the local
scene from the monent he arrives.”
- Anne Davison
“Men in a ship are always looking
up, and men ashore are usually looking down.”
- John Masefield
“To young men contemplating a voyage
I’d say go.”
- Joshua Slocum
“At sea, I learned how little a person
needs, not how much.”
-Robin Lee Graham
“A sailor is an artist whose medium
is the wind.”
-Webb
“Sailors, with their
built in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running
the world.”
- Nicholas Monsarrat
“Only fools and passengers drink
at sea.”
-Allan Villiers
“Out of sight of land the sailor
feels safe. It is the beach that worries him.”
-Charles C. Davis
“There is little man has made that approaches
anything in nature, but a sailing ship does. There is not much man has made
that calls to all the best in him, but a sailing ship does.”
– Allan Villiers
“The perfection of a yacht’s beauty
is that nothing should be there for only beauty’s sake.”
– John MacGregor
“The desire to build a house is the
tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a
single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling
yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.”
– Arthur Ransome
“There are only two colors to paint
a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black.”
– Nathanael G. Herreshoff
“For one thing, I was no longer alone;
a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three.”
– Hilaire Belloc
“If you can not arrive in daylight,
then stand off well clear, and wait until dawn. After all, that’s one of the
things God made boats for- to wait in.”
-Tristan Jones
“There is but a plank between a sailor
and eternity.”
– Thomas Gibbons
“A small craft in an ocean is, or
should be, a benevolent dictatorship.”
-Tristan Jones
“Long ocean passages usually don’t require engines;
it’s the ports and headlands at each end that may demand some expert sailing.”
- Hal Roth
“At last, the god-damned engine is
quiet!”
- William Snaith
“He was now convinced that the most
valuable sail on board was the diesel.”
- Ray Kauffman
“The only reason that Uldra’s engine never failed was because she did not have one.”
- Dennis Puleston
“I can’t wait for the oil wells to
run dry, for the last gob of black, sticky muck to come oozing out of some
remote well. Then the glory of sail will return.”
-Triston Jones
“Headwinds are sore vexations and the more passengers
the sorer.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Confronting a storm is like fighting
God. All the powers in the universe seem to be against you and, in an exraordinary way, your irrelevance is at the same time both
humbling and exalting.”
- Franciose LeGrande
“I once knew a writer who, after
saying beautiful things about the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane,
and he became a changed man.”
- Joshua Slocum
“The pleasures of being becalmed
became threadbare; there is a limit to untutored star gazing.”
-Charles Landery
“Off
- John Masefield
“There is no such thing as bad weather,
only bad clothes.”
-Old Norwegian Adage
“I loved cruising the coast of
-Herb Payson
“Being hove to in a long gale is
the most boring way of being terrified I know.”
- Donald Hamilton
“Below 50 degrees south there is
no law. Below 60 degrees south there is no God.”
-Old Sailors Adage
“I hate storms, but calms undermine
my spirits.”
- Bernard Moitessier
“It’s scary to have a 30 foot wave
chasing you. If you are steering, you don’t look back. The crew looks back
for you, and you watch their faces. When they look straight up, then
get ready!”
- Magnus Olsson
“Wind is to us what money is to life
on shore.”
-Sterling Hayden
“I don’t know who named them swells.
There’s nothing swell about them. They should have named them awfuls.”
-Hugo Vihlen
“It’s remarkable how quickly a good
and favorable wind can sweep away the maddening frustrations of shore living.”
-Ernest K. Gann
“A tradewind
starts gently, without gusts — a huge ocean of air that slowly and resolutely
begins to move with ever-increasing strength. Suddenly everything comes to
life. Spirits rise as the sails fill. The boat heels slightly and moves ahead.
The almost oppressive silence gives way to the sound of the bow cutting through
the water. Gone is the sea’s glassy surface, and with it the terrible glare.
Close the hatches and ports! We’re sailing again!”
- Jim Moore from By Way of the Wind, 1991
“Boats, like whiskey, are all good.”
-R.D. (Pete) Culler
“A ship is always referred to as
“she” because it costs so much to keep her in paint and powder.”
-ADM. Chester Nimitz
“I want a boat that drinks 6, eats
4, and sleeps 2.”
-Earnest K. Gann
“It looks like frozen snot.”
-L. Francis Herreshoff, looking at a Herreshoff Bullseye built of fiberglass.
“If a man is to be obsessed by something,
I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.”
-E. B. White
“You have no right to own a yacht
if you ask that question.”
-J. P. Morgan Sr., in answer to a question by Henry Clay Pierce on how much
it costs to own and run a yacht.
“Ships are the nearest things to
dreams that hands have ever made.”
-Robert N. Rose
“The cabin of a small yacht is truly
a wonderful thing; not only will it shelter you from a tempest, but from the
other troubles in life, it is a safe retreat.”
-L. Francist Herreshoff
“Bad cooking is responsible for more trouble
at sea than all other things put together.”
- Thomas Fleming Day
“To the question, “When were your
spirits at the lowest ebb?” the obvious answer seemed to be, “When the gin
gave out.”
- Sir Francis Chichester
“When a man comes to like a sea life,
he is not fit to live on land.”
- Dr. Samuel Johnson
“The wonder is always new that any
sane man can be a sailor.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The art of the sailor is to leave
nothing to chance.”
-Annie Van De Wiele
“Any damn fool can navigate the world
sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk.”
-Sir Francis Chichester while
loading his boat with gin.
“It isn’t that life ashore is distasteful
to me. But life at sea is better.”
- Sir Francis Drake
“The only way to get a good crew
is to marry one.”
- Eric Hiscock
“A sailing ship is no democracy;
you don’t caucus a crew as to where you’ll go anymore than you inquire when
they’d like to shorten sail.”
-Sterling Hayden
“I know who you are, but you’ll have
to wipe your feet.”
– Capt. Richard Brown of the schooner
“Only two sailors, in my experience,
never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar.”
- Don Bamford
“We had twelve hours of daylight,
and if we did not sight the coast, I should conclude that
-Frank Wightman
“The sea hates a coward.”
- Eugene O’Neill
“The ocean is an object of no small
terror.”
-Edmund Burke
“The sea drives truth into a man
like salt.”
- Hilaire Belloc
“I wanted freedom, open air and adventure.
I found it on the sea.”
- Alaine Gerbault
“Waves are not measured in feet or
inches, they are measured in increments of fear.”
-Buzzy
“The ocean has always been a salve
to my soul…the best thing for a cut or abrasion was to go swimming in salt
water. Later down the road of life, I made the discovery that salt water was
also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land.”
-Jimmy Buffett
“The sea is the same as it has been
since before men ever went on it in boats.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“The cure for anything is saltwater
— sweat, tears, or the sea.”
- Isak Dinesen
“To be successful at sea we must keep things
simple.”
-R. D. ( Pete ) Culler
“One of the best temporary cures
for pride and affection is seasickness.”
- Henry Wheeler Show
“The thing I realized this last few days is that the earth is a big place.”
- Paul Cayard
“ Land was created
to provide a place for boats to visit.”
- Brooks Atkinson
“Never a ship sails out of a bay,
but carries my heart as a stowaway.”
-
“Cruising has two pleasures. One
is to go out in wider waters from a sheltered place. The other is to go into
a sheltered place from wider waters.”
- Howard Bloomfield
“Our voyage hade commenced, and at
last we were away, gliding through the clean water, past the reeds. Care was
lifted from our shoulders, for we were free from advice, pessimism, officialism, heat and hot air.”
- K. Adlard Coles
“The single commandment of anchoring
is “thou shall create scope.”
- Reese Palley
“Don’t worry about the world coming
to an end today. It is already tomorrow in
- Charles M Schulz 7.19ish
I think I’ve discovered the secret
of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.”
-Charles M Schulz.
All women become like their mothers.
That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
Oscar Wilde
Every saint has a past and every
sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
The world is divided into two classes,
those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
These days man knows the price of
everything, but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Every perfect traveler always creates
the country where he travels.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The medium is not the message – the
message is the message.
Penn Jillette 7
Think what a better world it would
be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every
afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.
Barbara Jordan
Have a sense of humor about life
– you will need it. And be courteous.
Peter Jennings
Nature uses only the longest threads
to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the
organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard P. Feynman 8
It’s a sad man my friend who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company.
Bruce Springsteen
A voice is a human gift; it should
be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness
and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word
is power.
Margaret Atwood
An eye for an eye only leads to more
blindness.
Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine; that everyone
else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
A ratio of failures is built into
the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood
In the spring, at the end of the
day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
This above
all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
War is what happens when language
fails.
Margaret Atwood 6/10
We thought we were running away from
the grownups, and now we are the grownups. Margaret Atwood
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
Margaret Atwood
The answers you get from literature
depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
Because I am a mother, I am capable
of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Margaret Atwood
For years I wanted to be older, and
now I am.
Margaret Atwood
Gardening is not a rational act.
Margaret Atwood
I hope that people will finally come
to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are
all members of it.
Margaret Atwood
I’ve never understood why people
consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have
forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood
Falling out of love is chiefly a
matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
One doesn’t have to get anywhere
in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
Iris Murdoch
The absolute yearning of one human
body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one
of life’s major mysteries.
Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married.
One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
Iris Murdoch
You can’t be brave if you’ve only
had wonderful things happen to you.
Mary Tyler Moore
Life is like a piano. What you get
out of it depends on how you play it.
Tom Lehrer