I took this out from Okehampton library on saturday. They had a feature shelf about sea travel.
Page 3
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
A skiff is a small boat for a single person or a small crew.
The gulf stream starts in the Gulf of Mexico, and flows up the eastern coastline of the United States.
But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their order in another boat which caught three good fish in the first week.
Salao is Spanish slang, apprently used in central and latin America to mean Jinxed. Could be related to the Spanish word ‘salado’ meaning salty.
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast.
A gaff is a type of spear with a hook used for catching large fish.
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.
Cuba is just south of the tropic of cancer.
Page 5
The successful fishermen of that day were already in and had butchered their marlin out and carried them laid full length across two planks, with two men staggering at the end of each plank, to the fish house where they waited for the ice truck to carry them to the market in Havana.
Marlin can reach 5 meters in length, and can weigh 600-800Kg. They are most closely related to swordfish and have a similar spear.
Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out and their flesh cut into strips for salting.
My dad’s garage had a block and tackle for lifting car engines. Everyone always just called it the pulley. It was used once by theives to steal the safe.
Page 6
I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing.
A thwart is the plank that goes across the boat to form a seat.
Page 7
But you went turtling for years off the Mosquito Coast and your eyes are good.
The Mosquito Coast is and area that is now the eastern coast of Nicaragua and Honduras.
Page 8
The shack was made of the tough bud-shields of the royal palm which are called guano and in it there was a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal.
I think he’s talking about using palm leaves as thatch.
Page 9
How would you like to see me bring one in that dressed out over a thousand pounds?
Dressed weight is the weight of a carcass after being partially butchered.
Page 13
When I was your age I was before the mast on a square-rigged ship that ran to Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening.
Apparently being square-rigged means that there are beams holding up the rigging square to the keel of the ship.
Page 14
‘And the best fisherman is you.’
‘No. I know others better.’
‘Qué va,’ the boy said. ‘There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.’
Qué va means ‘no way’.
Page 15
He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning.
Oakum is used to make wooden ships and boats watertight. It’s was made by unpicking old rope, soaking it in tar, and hammering it into the seams of the ship.
Page 18
He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the thole pins, and leaning forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began to row out of the harbour in the dark.
Thole pins are pairs of metal bars on the side of rowboats to hold the oar.
He saw the phosphoresence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden drop of seven hundreds fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl of the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean.
Gulf weed is a type of seaweed. Brown, with air bladders, tends to form large masses. It’s also called sargasso weed.
Page 20
Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and sewed solid, and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines.
Apparently the part of a fish hook between the eye and the bend is called a shank.
Page 23
He shipped his oars and brough a small line from under the bow. It had a wire leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited it with one of the sardines. He let it go over the side and then made it fast to a ring bolt in the stem.
The stem is apparently the underside of the bow.
Page 24
But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close to the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.
‘Agua mala,’ the man said. ‘You whore.’
‘Bad water’
Page 29
I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well.
Bight is a loop of rope.
Page 32
‘I wish I had the boy,’ the old man said aloud. ‘I’m being towed by a fish and I’m the towing bitt.
Towing bitts are vertical posts that mooring and towing ropes are tied to.
Page 33
He rested sitting on the unstepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.
Unstepping a mast is taking it down (off of it’s steps).
Page 37
Some time before daylight somthing took one of the baits that were behind him. He heard the stick break and the line begin to rush out over the gunwale of the skiff.
The gunwale is the upper edge of the side of a boat.
Page 45
‘Light brissa,’ he said. ‘Better weather for me than for you, fish.’
Spanish for breeze.
Page 46
I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body. It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhoea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it.
Ptomaine is a chemical formed in rotting meat or vegetables.
But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone.
Calambre is Spanish for muscle cramp.
page 51
This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.
A small growth of bone caused by inflamation.
What is a bone spur? He asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them.
Literally Spanish for bone spur.
Page 99
‘Tiburon,’ the waiter said, ‘Eshark.’ He was meaning to explain what had happened.
Tiburon is Spanish for shark.