Knowing the right sailing terms to use on board a boat is not JUST a way of sounding super cool and impressing your friends. (Though it works for that, too.) It’s actually very useful, and sometimes crucial in communicating while you’re sailing. Some of the vocabulary used on board boats can sound arcane, which it is! That’s part of what’s fun about it; we’re still using terms that have been used by sailors for hundreds of years. So when you know your terminology, you’re participating in the grand sailing tradition, and you don’t have to say, “Can you hand me …
Sailing Terms Quiz (III)
How about another awesome ASA quiz, where you get compliments or a wisecrack. The last two have been about terminology and we’ve had feedback saying that they were too easy.
Sailing Terms Quiz (II)
Another quick little online sailing terms quiz from our Sailing Made Easy book.
Sailing Terms Quiz
Okay, here’s a quick little quiz of sailing terms born from our Sailing Made Easy textbook.
The Evolution of the Sail
No one knows quite how sailing began, though it’s certainly been going on for thousands of years. For example, way back in 1200 BC the Greeks launched 1,000 ships and sailed to Troy, and subsequently Odysseus went on one of the worst Mediterranean sailing charters in history trying to get home again. Like most things, the creation of a sail probably started as an accident–someone somewhere held a piece of cloth up to the wind and noticed that it made their canoe/raft/piece of driftwood move faster. From those humble beginnings, the idea of using a sail to move through the …