Quotes About Seamanship

Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk.

A captain of the Navy ought to be a man of strong and well connected sense, with a tolerable good education, a gentleman, as well as a seaman both in theory and practice.

The best that science can devise and that naval organization can provide must be regarded only as an aid, and never as a substitute for good seamanship.

Chapman's Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling

I asked him what he thought of the Great Lakes now. I'm surprised at how much seamanship is required to sail them. I always thought they were for wussies, that only the oceans were worthy of tough guys like me. But in the ocean there's not much to hit, it mostly requires endurance. These lakes can kick your ass.

There was no tolerance in the Navy for the weaklings and the incompetents who would not learn to keep themselves and their uniforms clean; who were late on watch; or who failed to master the basics demanded by the Navy. They had been beaten for every infraction of the simple rules of seamanship, encouraging them either to conform or to get out.

In political activity . . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership – who will have the courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seamanship.

They had good reason. Cyrus Pembridge was easily the worst captain in British nautical history. He had never bothered to learn even the basics of seamanship, choosing instead to occupy his time consuming vast quantities of rum.

Good seamanship is recovering from an incident at sea. Great seamanship is avoiding an incident at sea.

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

Whatever doubts there may have been about their seamanship, there were none as to their courage.