Boats and life This is an unforgettable collection of ninety short tales about the boating Matthew Goldman has done in his life—in sailboats, canoes, rowboats, and other floating craft. All these memoirs deal with the water—from the puddle to the sea. They wander, as reflective as a sandy-bottomed brook. They linger, as wistful as an idle boat in summer. They revel, as jubilant as broaching porpoises. Who will want to read about Constant Waterman? Anyone who’s ever paused to watch a water strider; anyone who’s ever stood and listened to the sea; anyone who leans when they see a sloop heel; anyone who hopes to find a message in a bottle. Here is that message. Unfold it carefully, read it aloud. Read about boats; read about passages; read about islands; read about the rain. Learn about a murder in the woods by the river; learn about restoring a wooden boat. Hear about sailors, boat builders, ferrymen; hear about canoeing amid the marshes. The best part about it? You don’t have to spend your time sanding and varnishing. You don’t need to don any foul weather gear. You don’t need to know a bowline from a boom vang, or know how to pole a canoe. Here is the world of Constant Waterman: wry, introspective, intimate, impassioned. Turn another page. You may find a lighthouse, you may find a swan. You’ll hear the hoarse cadence of the sea grinding shingle, the wrinkling song of a stream through the forest, the complaint of the wind in your standing rigging. Listen. *Includes 50 beautiful pen-and-ink drawings by the author. *

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Vincus the Griffin is summoned by Queen Portulaca to rescue Galumph the Horse from Planet Earth, so he can clean up The Endless Forest. Afterwards, Vincus visits Lady Giselle to teach her how to care for and propagate the last endangered species in The Real World the soft and lovable Dust Bunnies.

Make your modern sailboat look (and work) like a salty classic. The Golden Age of Sail is long past, sadly, and much of its lore is nearly extinct. Sailboats now almost uniformly use the Bermudan sloop rig—a triangular jib and a triangular mainsail. But that rig evolved mainly to meet esoteric yacht-racing measurement rules. It is not necessarily the most efficient or effective rig. This book lets sailors rediscover the practical advantages—and the aesthetic delights—of such configurations as the sprit sail, the gaff sail, the lug sail, and the gunter rig. It also includes valuable information on marlinspike work like rope-whipping and eye-splicing; and tips on converting your modern sailboat to a traditional rig. ______________________ Some reviews: “This will become the classic book on traditional rigs for small boats. . . . A concise and thorough compendium on using low-cost and efficient traditional rigs, the kind that not only look better but work better on small boats than their modern counterparts.” —Gary Blankenship, Duckworks Magazine “The ‘traditional’ rigs here are the kind you’ll find on the clinker plywood designs of Iain Oughtred and the like; rigs with polyester sails and running rigging. Tufnol blocks and stainless steel shackles. ‘Modern traditional boats’, if you’ll forgive the phrase. Similarly, there’s a nice mix of old and new the manner the material is presented: old in the cleanliness of the page design; new in the extensive use of colour close-up photographs to illustrate details of the rigs. Highly recommended.” —Water Craft Magazine "Mr. Nichols does an excellent job of explaining the fundamentals in terms that are useful to old salts looking to tweak their rigs, builders trying to figure out what's next, and admirers of traditional design." —Good Old Boat

The first major study of slavery in the maritime South, The Waterman's Song chronicles the world of slave and free black fishermen, pilots, rivermen, sailors, ferrymen, and other laborers who, from the colonial era through Reconstruction, plied the vast inland waters of North Carolina from the Outer Banks to the upper reaches of tidewater rivers. Demonstrating the vitality and significance of this local African American maritime culture, David Cecelski also reveals its connections to the Afro-Caribbean, the relatively egalitarian work culture of seafaring men who visited nearby ports, and the revolutionary political tides that coursed throughout the black Atlantic. Black maritime laborers played an essential role in local abolitionist activity, slave insurrections, and other antislavery activism. They also boatlifted thousands of slaves to freedom during the Civil War. But most important, Cecelski says, they carried an insurgent, democratic vision born in the maritime districts of the slave South into the political maelstrom of the Civil War and Reconstruction.