How I Came to Hate Sailing

It started with Moby Dick.

I was in college and twenty years old — about the same age as Ishmael and the only age at which one can actually revel in Melville’s masterpiece. The book was assigned reading, but once I began I could not stop and plowed straight through, skipping both college classes and personal hygiene until I reached the end.

Over forty years have passed since I read Moby Dick and my college days are a distant memory. However, on a regular basis over the past decades, when I was at a loss for something to read I would turn to books that involved nineteenth-century sailing. The stories, sometimes fiction, more often not, always told of a bunch of nineteenth-century men deciding to sail somewhere or explore something and thereafter having a really miserable time.

I read about Shackelton and his exploration of Antarctica, about the exploration of the Arctic, the search for the Northwest Passage, sea routes to the Indies, and anything else the promised me sea, sailing, and suffering.

In one of these books, I came across a reference to a slungshot. Although I believe I have a slingshot somewhere in the camping gear kept in my garage, I had never heard of a “slungshot.” I turned to Wikipedia and learned the following:

Not to be confused with slingshot.