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here is our bartender?" I was the only club member left in the bar, but I was not the only drinker. A cruise-in from across the Bay had brought a halfdozen boats to our guest dock, and since I was the only member present, it fell on me to serve drinks. "You can tell I didn't work my way through college as a bartender," I remarked, as a very thirsty woman talked me through the procedure for mixing a cosmopolitan to her exacting and rigorous specifications. Two more sailors hove up to the bar, fortunately with simple orders for draft beer, and even more fortunately, they coached me on the right way to hold the glass under the tap. "How'd your race go last weekend?" one of them asked the other, once they had beers in hand. "Oh, we had fun," he replied. "That bad, huh?" "The boat is a lead mine and a broach coach. After the first banana split, the back of the boat called for a letterbox, then changed their minds and wanted a Mexican. The front porch was so confused it ended up being a Casper. Fortunately we had tee'd up the blade before the bottom pin, and on the uphill leg we tucked a reef in the backflapper. "We thought about reefing too," said the other race crew, who had been on a different boat in the same race. "Our stick is a noodle, so we can blade out the main with the permanent and pull the draft forward with the smart pig. But the leech was still motorboating." They were joined by a younger sailor who had her own sea story to relate from the dinghy fleet: "I was on the wire — reached in to bone the gnav; next thing I was tea-bagging." "Do you have any idea what they are talking about?" asked the woman with the cosmopolitan, beteween sips. "Sailor talk," I shrugged. "I guess I need a nautical dictionary," she said. "I'm trying to learn as much as I can about sailing." "You won't find those words in any dictionary," said one of the racing sailors. "Not your fault, it's a failure on the dictionaries' part. Some people think a dictionary is there to tell us what is proper and correct usage, but the real purpose of a good dictionary is to document how people actually use the language. Dictionaries should be descriptive, not
PHOTOS LATITUDE / TIM UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED proscriptive." "Yeah, I still run into people who think a 'boater' is a kind of hat," said the other sailor, "and they can pull out a dictionary to prove it." "Speaking of lost causes and pointless pedantry," said his friend, "I sailed with one skipper who insisted his crew all know the difference between flaking and faking when a halyard tail is made up. But I still get them confused." "I dunno," added the dinghy sailor. "It's useful to know the difference between a cam cleat, a jam cleat and a clam cleat." That's when I remembered something that Lee Helm had left on the yacht club bar some weeks ago. After a quick search through the drawers behind the bar, I had it in my hands: The Etymological Dictionary of Modern Nautical Jargon. It was just a bunch of papers stapled together, obviously an early draft, probably unfinished. I looked up "smart pig," and there was the answer: "Cunningham." I handed the document to the confused woman at the bar. "Thank you, this will help a lot," she said after checking a few more arcane bits of slang. Despite some difficulty with the new electronic cash register, I finally figured out how to ring up her drink and charge her credit card. She wanted to add a generous tip. "No, you only tip the paid bartenders," I insisted. "I'm a volunteer." But she still left some cash on the bar when she went back to her table. Clearly we need Lee Helm to compile a treatise on yacht club etiquette. max ebb
"The real purpose of a dictionary is to document how people actually use the language."
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adult trophies n. trophies awarded for racing success, as opposed to contrived categories such as "most improved" or "best wine list" or "biggest fish caught" (probably coined by sailmaker Kame Richards in 2014 in reference to Pacific Cup cruising division). aircraft carrier n. flush-deck cruising
boat with bow-to-stern accommodations, especially if too small to have reasonable proportions with a flush deck. asshole n. kink or hockle in a sheet or halyard, preventing it from running though a fairlead. See Blackaller autotack n. 1) a tack caused by a wind shift, requiring little or no alteration of course. 2) a sudden accidental tack caused by backwinding the jib. back porch n. swim step or transom scoop. backflapper n. mainsail banana split n. jibe-broach Barbie coffin n. lifting rudder cassette (used by Vince Valdes, builder of Columbia Carbon 32, possibly coined by designer Tim Kernan). barn door jibe n. method of jibing asymmetrical spinnaker in which the sail swings out in front of the boat. barn door 1) n. first-to-finish position for any long ocean race, especially transpac. 2) n. type of asymmetrical spinnaker jibe in which the sheets run forward of the spinnaker tack and the spinnaker
