Bowline

Are those bowline knots on your sweatshirt there?

Oh, these? Yeah.

Bowline's

killer or what? Huh? They look like bowline knots, but I don't know.

I'm not.

And to cap it all, coming into our home port, beating up the narrowest part of the San Antonio estuary, we had a shave of inches from collision, with a big ship in tow of a tug.

I have sailed the ocean in far larger craft a year at a time, in which period occurred no such chapter of moving incident." after all the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing looking back they prove to be punctuations of joy at the time they try your mettle and your vocabulary and may make you so pessimistic as to believe that god has a grudge against you but afterward ah afterward with what pleasure you remember them and with what gusto do you relate them to your brother skippers in the fellowhood of small-boat sailing a narrow winding slough a half-tide exposing mud surfaced with gangrenous slime the water itself filthy and discolored by the waste from the vats of a near-by tannery the marsh grass on either side mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid a crazy ramshackled ancient wharf and at the end of the wharf a small white-painted sloop nothing romantic about it no hint of adventure a splendid pictorial argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing possibly that is what cloudesley and i thought that somber leaden morning as we turned out to cook breakfast and wash decks the latter was my stunt but one look at the dirty water overside and another at my fresh-painted deck deterred me after breakfast we started a game of chess the tide continued to fall and we felt the sloop begin to list we played on until the chessmen began to fall over the list increased and we went on deck Bowline and stern line were drawn taut.

As we looked, the boat listed still farther with an abrupt jerk.

The lions were now very taut.