sailing
Many sailboat owners in Latvia are quite happy with their compact Gulf of Riga sailing area, a couple of regattas per season and the typical odd over-the-weekend destination Ruhnu (a tiny Estonian island), worse even, I am told that locked in a lake in Kurzeme (formerly known as Kurland) isolated from the sea there is a 32 foot Bavaria among quite a few smaller sailboats united by the lake-based Usma sailing club. Unlike them I become claustrophobic every time I so much as think of sailing in...
Here are some of the movies on sailing I have seen in my life. As far as the honorable directors have managed to portray it. Some of the movies are about competitions and in some movies the yachts are used as a backdrop for a crime thriller or the depiction of comical or funny adventures. What sailing movies have you seen?
The cat of nine tails. Every single man on the ship was subjected to the captain. He could punish the insubordinate. The captain would shorten rations for lesser offenses, but major offenses were punished by tying the man to the mast and whipping him with a rope-end (up to 100 lashes) or up to 30 lashes with the cat of nine tails (a whip made of several strips of leather with pieces of metal attached to it). The culprit was usually incautious for several hours after the punishment and slept...
A long time ago Antoine de Saint Exupery once said that “There is a poetry of sailing as old as the world.” What does sailing really mean for us, sailors, and not the ones just looking at us?
The number of answers to the questions are as many as the sailors themselves. One cannot deny that everyone has a small daredevil inside, a sort of an adventurous spirit inside us that makes us look further, a little further, just behind the horizon. Sailing is the never ending thirst for adventures,...
One of the best days of the voyage.
After a good night’s sleep I am sitting at the breakfast table with a fellow traveler and he has decided to join the ranks of the yachtsmen – I guess my stories have made him believe, that it is going to be fun. I expected the chili with mixed vegetables and shrimp to be a bit spicier, but it was good nevertheless. We had mango shake for dessert – it cost very little here, and is served nicely in a tall glass – a good start for a day on the waves.
We have created an e-mail list, where the sailors will get a chance to exchange their opinions as well as ask for help and give advice. Maybe a captain is looking for crew members for a race, a voyage or just a trip. Or maybe someone just wants to become a crew member. The list would give you a chance to talk about yachting, competitions, leisure sailing, seafaring, ports/harbors and the good and bad sides of them, as well as any special advices and any other topics you can imagine. It means...
Black cats and Friday 13th are just a small portion of all the superstitions. The strange thing about this article is the fact that it was written on Friday 13th and thus makes me smirk a little. Everyone can decide on his own, if he believes it or not, but as it turns out, the yachtsmen are a bit superstitious. Here are just some examples of superstitions about sailing and the sea.It’s for you to decide whether they are true or not.
