Abaft

The Oxford English Dictionary has “ab-“ as meaning “away from”. If that were so then “abaft” would presumably mean away from the stern. In fact it means just the opposite: if something is abaft something else then it’s between it and the stern.

A-hull

You’ve given up. Outside the storm rages. The sails are down and you’re crouching in the saloon, many of your possessions around you, casting around for your laminated copy of the lyrics of “Abide With Me”. You are lying a-hull.

Almanac

A good almanac will tell you almost everything you need to know to go sailing in an area. Tides, moonrise, port information: it’s all there. Just get a chart and get going. The word is of obscure, medieval Latin origins and not, incredibly, from Arabic.

Clog almanacs (or runic staffs) are primitive almanacs made out of small logs of wood, notched with the weeks of the year and religious festivals and are now available only through museums since they do not use the WGS84 datum.

Anchor

The anchor is a device that’s supposed to attach you to the seabed while you stop for lunch or longer. Anchoring is fraught with difficulty and if you decide, unwisely, to stay overnight and get it wrong, you will end up grinding against rocks, thudding on sand, floating untrammelled down the river or crashing against other anchorees in the pitch black. Even if you get it right you won’t get much sleep because you can’t quite be sure you got it right. See also swallow the anchor.

Antifouling

Very expensive paint formulated to deter marine creatures from attaching themselves to your underwater hull. It does this by slowly dissolving and so requiring further expensive paint each year. Thus, a paint maker’s dream.

Aoki, Hiroshi

Hiroshi Aoki should be more widely known. He set off in a home-made plywood boat Ahodori II 20 foot 8 inches long from Japan and circumnavigated the globe between 1971 and 1974. The boat remains the smallest one to do this and looks so frail with its Perspex windows and stringy rigging that you would feel nervous on it in Southport Marine Lake with the entire resources of the RNLI poised around the perimeter. What happened to Ahodori I is not known. Probably having constructed it by the origami technique out of waxed rice paper he crossed the Pacific in it in a test run. With old Hiroshi you just never know.

ARC, The

The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. A kind of flotilla holiday on the Atlantic.

Astern, going

Sometimes known as “reverse” this means engaging propulsion to go backwards. While some yachts may go backwards in the normal sense of the word, for many “astern” means going in the general direction of the stern. What with prop kick, wind and tides, keeping within the arc of the stern light (i.e. +/- 67.5 degrees of the intended direction) is pretty good. Astern activity is an excellent source of Schadenfreude.

Automatic Identification System(AIS)

A system fitted to big ships that broadcasts where and who they are and their course and speed. So, if you invest in a receiver, you can know who is about to run you down in fog.

ABAFT TO ZEITGEIST - A