With blows like the ones we have had in the past few days, and the reports of even worse seafaring along the East Coast of the United States, local fishing scene has approached its absolute depths of any season.

Only a very few commercial operators are venturing out at all, and with servicing their lobster gear their primary intentions.

This has left most sportsmen dreaming of things to come and a few zealots have actually started to look at working on their gear to have it ready for the arrival of happier days.

More enterprising anglers have taken advantage of the lack of fishing opportunities locally to travel south to take in this week’s Miami Boat Show. This boat show is a really major event which offers myriad ways of parting with virtually any amount of money on electronics, accessories and any number of hulls themselves.

The boats on offer range from little skiffs to mega-yachts with seemingly endless options for interior designs and propulsion.

Hidden away in this maelstrom of maritime madness is an area where the anglers and professional skippers gather.

This is a section of the show dominated by lies and half-truths supplied by any number of fishermen, wannabe fishermen and true masters of the art.

Quite apart from the tackle and related advances and products on show, there is an opportunity to learn from the truly great or to bathe in their reflected glory.

This is also first-rate exposure of various fishing destinations and without any doubt the Bermuda contingent certainly provide glowing accounts of what this island has to offer, especially in the light of the big billfish tournaments that dominate the month of July.

Sort of like virtual fishing for some.

So, here at home, in the absence of real fishing due to the vagaries of winter weather and the need to carry out annual maintenance on craft, perhaps it is time to look at some of the oxymorons so freely bandied about, both by those who routinely cruise the briny and the honest-to-goodness landlubber.

For starters, boats are said to “sail” for sea, be they actual sailing craft or motor-driven from punt to cruise ship on to aircraft carrier. What “sail” has to do with any of the latter is anyone’s guess. It can only hearken back to the day when sailing ships sailed on the tide and were said to be “ship shape”.

A possible explanation for this is that, in the glory days of old, many of the ports were located in estuaries. London is a classic example, and to make a departure for the high seas easier it made sense to travel as the tide ebbed and the river’s flow downstream started to dominate.

This made it easy for the ship to travel seaward with the current driven by the river. For modern power craft the state of the river makes little difference but the terminology remains alive and well.

“Ship shape” makes sense because if things were all messed up with cargo left just about everywhere prior to being properly stowed took away from the seagoing vessel look that made a ship a ship. By the time ropes were rigged, the cargo properly stowed down below and the hatches battened down, the vessel then appeared to be the seagoing ship that it was intended to be.

As styles of organising vessels varied somewhat from place to place, things might be qualified a bit more by saying something like: “Ship shape and Bristol fashion”. Bristol being a major port on the Severn River in England.

Then there is the apparent conundrum, at least for some people, involving which side of the boat is which. It is really quite simple. Standing in the middle of the boat or ship and facing forward toward the bow or usually pointy bit of the boat, the left-hand side is the “port” side and the right-hand side is the “starboard” side. Where it gets tricky is that this doesn’t change.

If you turn around from your initial position and are looking astern to where the boat is going, both the port and starboard sides remain the same. That might take some getting used to, but consider the fact that up until not all that long ago, “port” did not exist. It was referred to as ‘larboard”. Imagine how this worked, conjure up a tall ship in a howling gale and a skipper yelling at the crew to do something on the “board side”, talk about getting meaning lost in translation!

Actually, there is a fascinating amount to learn in the origin and evolution of maritime terms. While many are still limited to seafarers and things related to the shipping and boating industries a surprising number of terms are a standard part of our language today. Add to these the vernacular that sprang up from the various techniques used by fishermen and even angling takes on its own lexicon; where it is a good thing to be wished Tight Lines!