Cleat the rope, set the shoot, cinch up your pee-ef-dee

We ride a puff at high speed into the leeward mark, execute a seamless change from spinnaker to genoa, deftly slip inside of two boats at the mark and make a perfect rounding. As we harden up for the beat, I call to the trimmers, “Trim her full and by, boys.”

What did he say? Full of what?

OK, I didn’t really say that. If I had, the crew would no doubt have done what crews always do when a ridiculous instruction is shouted from the back of the boat—acted as though they hadn’t heard it. You couldn’t blame them. They’re not expected to know what “full and by” means. It’s one of hundreds of archaic terms that have little relevance today but are preserved, like precious antiques, in the sailing lexicon.

That lexicon is huge. Few human pursuits—perhaps only warfare and some scientific disciplines—have a unique language as extensive as sailing’s. Nautical dictionaries published over the years number in the dozens, if not scores. Some on my bookshelf are nearly two inches thick. No sailing term, it seems, no matter how ancient or recondite, can ever be discarded.

Many of the ancient terms, of course, are still in use. Sir Francis Drake could step aboard an exotic 21st century racer like a Transpac 52 and, while he might be puzzled by the strange materials used to make the hull, spars and sails (definitely not English oak, spruce and cotton), know what crewmembers were talking about when they used the words “halyard,” “sheet” or “guy.”

Sailors are famously protective of their storied lingo. Neophytes may be cheerfully forgiven for knowing little or nothing about the skills of sailing, but God forbid they should come aboard and commit that cliched newcomer’s sin of calling a line a rope.

Here’s an old quiz, but be warned, it has a new answer: How many ropes are there on a modern sailboat? The new answer is none. The old answer was usually two—a bell rope and a boltrope. But few newer boats carry a fog bell and most sails today don’t have real boltropes.

This may be unsettling to those who rigidly defend the orthodoxy of traditional sailing language, but the issue of line and rope isn’t as cut and dried as is generally believed. Authorities agree that rope is the correct term for bulk cordage at least one inch in diameter and most concur with Graham Blackburn, author of The Overlook Illustrated Dictionary of Nautical Terms, when he defines line as “the correct nautical term for rope used aboard a ship.”

But it’s not unanimous. You had better be sitting down when you read the disturbing words that follow from Thompson Lenfestey, author of one of my favorite sailing reference books, The Sailor’s Illustrated Dictionary:

“Some of the most specious and arbitrary writing has arisen over use of the word ‘rope’ on seagoing vessels. Some writers flatly declare that when cordage comes aboard a vessel it is line unless it is specifically named, as with boltrope; but this bit of mystique was unheard of a hundred years or so ago.”

Shocking stuff. At least we can say there is no such controversy over the historic term that must be the most frequently used command in sailing—“ready about.” Everyone knows the definition is, as The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea succinctly puts it, “the order in a sailing vessel to be prepared to tack,” though some sailors treat the term with more reverence than others. On some boats it’s part of a carefully scripted exercise in which the helmsman shouts “ready about?” phrased as a question, then waits for each crewmember to answer in the affirmative before announcing “hard alee” (a corruption of “helm’s alee”) and turning the boat.

As a tradition it’s fine, but it’s a slow, not to mention tedious, process, not well suited to situations when, as in a race, it’s necessary to tack often and quickly. Many racing helmsmen simply announce that the boat is tacking and let the crew sort it out. A further refinement in terse substitutes for “ready about” can sometimes be found on racing boats that have celebrity tacticians on board. These gurus, the well-paid sailing equivalents of wizards in a king’s court, command the rapt attention of the crew and when, after consulting various computerized gizmos and the all-knowing seats of their pants, they grunt a barely audible “tack,” the sailors respond with alacrity and precision, lest the oracle be displeased.

Such tacks are not made “handsomely,” which means slowly and carefully and is a wonderful old sailing term that you can find over and over again in the works of Patrick O’Brian. Not all the words in the sailing lexicon are old or wonderful or as kind to the ear as “handsomely.” The most unfortunate addition in recent years, in my opinion, is PFD.

Oxford defines it as “U.S. officialese for life preserver.” We’re stuck with it because after the BICORPANT (Bureaucracy in Charge of Replacing Perfectly Acceptable Names for Things) came up with “personal flotation device” it realized the term was too clumsy to use, as in, “We’re sinking—distribute the personal flotation devices!” Hence, PFD. Unfortunately, it’s a failure in that it not only sounds bad, but is no easier or faster to say (phonetically pee-ef-dee) than “life vest.”

Abbreviations have contributed other terms to contemporary sailing language, including the computer navigation shorthand of COG (course over ground) and SOG (speed over ground). Unlike PFD, these at least are acronyms that can be used as lower case verbs and gerunds: “Can you believe we’re sogging at 12.1 knots!”

Some new sailing words were simply made up, such as the odd “soak,” meaning to maximize distance to leeward while sailing downwind. To steer a boat is now to “drive” it and the nickname for a spinnaker has evolved from “chute” to “kite.” The latter, however, is already outmoded, as true kite sails, definitely not spinnakers in that they are attached to the boat only by a tether, now exist.

“Chute” is derived from the term in use when spinnakers were invented—parachute spinnaker. The other day on a sailing Web site I read a well-known professional yacht racer’s account of a breezy race in which, he wrote, “we managed to set the masthead shoot.” Let’s hope he’s a better tactician than wordsmith.

As for full and by, even if the crew did know what I was talking about, I would have been wrong to use the term. For it means to sail as close to the wind as possible without, as Oxford puts it, “any shiver in the luff of the sails.” After rounding the mark, we’d have been in high point mode with plenty of shiver in the genoa and telltales dancing to keep the weather gauge on the boats we had victimized at the mark.

weather gauge n. A vessel to weather of another is said to have the weather gauge.