First things first. Never say boat when you are clearly on a ship! Do you know the difference? I now know that a boat is something that navigates along coastal and inland waters. Ships sail on the ocean. Ships are also bigger than boats but I don’t know how much bigger. The Lady told me that ships always have names. Ours was called the Oddest of the Seas. That was interesting. I wondered what made it the oddest of the seas.
Then I saw the name…ODYSSEY. Odyssey means an eventful, adventurous journey that is often marked by good fortune. Odyssey sounds like a better name for a ship than Oddest. After I roamed Rome, I went on an odyssey on The Odyssey!
Once I learned that we were staying in a cabin on a ship and not a room on a boat, I thought I was good to go with ship words. Nope. I had more ship-speak to learn.
Despite there being lots of stairs and elevators like in a hotel, ships don’t have floors, they have decks. Well, I think I walked on the floor, so they sort of have floors, but the different levels between all of the stairs and elevators are called decks, Deck numbers told you whether you are close to the water or high above it. All of the decks had maps on them.
The maps used the words forward and aft to talk about the front and the back of the ship. I understand why they say forward. That is the front of the ship so you have to move forwrd to get there. But aft? That sounds like it should be after, but forward and after don’t make sense together. Why, if the front of the ship is called forward, is the back of the ship not called backward?
I borrowed The Lady’s fun to look up what the word aft means. Aft means.
Near or toward the stern of a ship.
That was not helpful because I didn’t know what the stern of the ship was. Back to Google to look that up. The stern of a ship is:
the back or aft-most part of a ship or boat
Since ships and boats both have an aft-most part, a stern, I guess ships have big sterns and boats have little sterns. Hmmm…Is it nice to say that your ship has a big stern?
This whole aft and stern thing got me thinking. If aft means toward the stern, what are you close to when you are forward-most? Google told me that the front of a ship, and a boat, is called the bow. That’s funny. The front of our ship didn’t have any ribbon. I asked The Lady about this bow thing. She said, “it is not bow, it’s bow.” That cleared things right up! Not. Then she said that it is not b+o, but b+ ouch without the ch part. I get it! Bow like at the end of theatre production! But wait. If bows happen at the end, why is the front of the ship called the bow? And I don’t want the bow to bow because then it will be in the water and this furry little blue and orange monster obviously doesn’t know much anything about ships, but I’m pretty sure the bow being in the water is not a good thing! I think this may be b-ouch with the ch!
I finally sort of got the whole aft-forward and stern-bow stuff figured out and then I see two more new words on the map – port and starboard.
I thought I knew what port meant. It is like a driveway for a ship. We went to the port where the ship was parked to get on it. Starboard sounds like a control panel on a spaceship! I quickly learned that port and starboard are ship-talk for left and right. Starboard comes from two Old English words for steer and boat, being mushed together. Most sailors steered with their right hand so that is why when facing forward on a ship, the right side is the starboard side. In the old days, the right handed sailors always drove so that the left side of the boat was the loading side, the side that was closest to the port. This all sort of makes sense, but I wonder if the left-handed sailors get confused.
In case you are wondering, our cabin was on deck 10, port side aft. We did not have a room on the tenth floor toward the back of the boat on the left.
I was going to show you around the Odyssey of the Seas in this post, but my monster claws are tired from typing and my monster brain is worn out from explaining all of this ship talk. I promise my next post will be more fun!