{"id":2341,"date":"2020-05-11T08:40:09","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/?p=2341"},"modified":"2020-05-11T08:40:13","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:40:13","slug":"nautical-terminator-suns-over-the-yardarm-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/nautical-terminator\/nautical-terminator-suns-over-the-yardarm-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Nautical Terminator – Sun’s Over the Yardarm (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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              It is\nwell understood that sailing while inebriated is a very bad idea. It\u2019s contrary\nto Tradewinds policy, and it\u2019s against the law. But even on one\u2019s own boat,\noffshore beyond the reach of society\u2019s sanctions, the notion that one can\nconfront the sea with less than his best game represents a cracking good\nexample of overconfidence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

              All this\nbeing granted, one would have to be living under the proverbial rock to be\nunaware of the fact that hard drink has a long association with sailing\u2014so long\nthat it was less than five decades ago that the British Navy abandoned its\ndaily distribution of alcohol to men on warships. It\u2019s hard to believe they\nwere drunk while blasting away at the enemy with cannon fire in all those\nlegendary battles. But come to think of it, it\u2019s just as hard to believe they\nweren\u2019t. The practice has spawned a whole category of colorful phrases like\n\u201csplice the main brace,\u201d \u201cgroggy,\u201d \u201cthree sheets to the wind,\u201d and \u201cthe sun\u2019s\nover the yardarm.\u201d The first three of these are amply defined in Admiral W. H.\nSmyth\u2019s commodious lexicon of 1867, but the last goes unmentioned despite the\nauthor\u2019s obvious fondness for salty language. In fact it doesn\u2019t appear until\n1899, well past the golden age of sail, when Rudyard Kipling uses it in Sea to Sea<\/em>, and even then not in a\nparticularly nautical context. In a passage excoriating the loutish behavior of\nAmericans, he writes: \u201cAs you know, of\ncourse, the American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed,\nhe has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day. Also he has no decent\nnotions about the sun being over the yard-arm or below the horizon. He pours\nhis vanity into himself at unholy hours, and indeed he can hardly help it.\u201d<\/em>\nYeah, Rudyard, but we won the Revolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

              Nevertheless\nwe can ask, just what is<\/em> a \u201cyardarm,\u201d\nanyway, and how do we use it to measure the height of the sun? Having\naccomplished that, how to we convert the sun\u2019s altitude to establish the time\nof day? Can it have been this easy to tell the hour by just looking up at the\nrigging? Even though the answers to all these questions are of no use\nwhatsoever to the modern mariner, they will be the subject of our next few\ninstallments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

              It is well understood that sailing while inebriated is a very bad idea. It\u2019s contrary to Tradewinds policy, and it\u2019s against the law. But even on one\u2019s own boat, offshore beyond the reach of society\u2019s sanctions, the notion that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nautical-terminator"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2341"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2341\/revisions\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tradewindssailing.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}