Evanston: yare
Evanston: yare
Unlike many of you who come from nautical backgrounds, with ancestors who were ship’s captains, boatbuilders and sailors, I don’t. I invented myself in a corn field--actually a suburb of Saint Louis, which is pretty much the same thing. So perhaps ‘yare’ is not a new word to you. It is to me. I came across it yesterday in a novel, THE SONG OF ACHILLES, used to describe the ship in which Odysseus went to Troy. I had to look it up.
yare. of a ship: quick to the helm, easily handled or maneuvered.
The word is not even archaic.
GANNET is yare.
It would be amusing to work yare into an article and see what readers make of that.
I finished a short article with the working title, ‘Comfort and Joy.’ Not a Christmas carol. But based in part on the ‘water, joy’ entry. For many years almost all of my published writing has had its start in this journal. You read it here first.
I also included in the article the quote from E. F. Knight.
I finished THE FALCON IN THE BALTIC over the weekend.
The last part is about sailing along the eastern coast of Denmark. The book continued to be a pleasure to the end.
A point that needs to be clarified is that while the subtitle is ‘cruising from Hammersmith to Copenhagen in a three-ton yacht,’ the crossing of the North Sea was not direct to Copenhagen, but from the east coast of England, near Harwich, to Holland, from where The FALCON made her way to Denmark via canals and rivers.
Inquiring minds have asked. The photo is of the kitchen sink. Perhaps I should say ‘galley’; but GANNET has no plumbing, no fixed water tank, no pumps (the FALCON’s leak reminded me I need to figure out how I’m going to pump water from GANNET’s bilge) and when it just sits on the floorboards, ‘galley’ might be too grand. But then so is ‘kitchen’.
Monday, April 29, 2013