Yachting

Friday

Peter Watson

The trouble with yachts

Yacht owners are well-heeled and outgoing types, perfect devotees of good food and wine. Drinking and yachting does not carry the same stigma as drinking and driving. But yachts are not exactly small things so where, exactly, do you put your boat when you stop somewhere for lunch or dinner? A guide has now been published, telling yacht-owners which Palm Beach restaurants are boat-friendly, how much dock space each establishment has, whether or not there are docking fees, whether “rafting” is sometimes necessary (ferrying people to and from the dining area from the dock), whether overnight parking is permitted (in case you imbibe too much), what is the maximum size of boat accepted, whether table service on the boat is available and for what fee and whether sailboats are permitted.

yachts

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Will inclusion sink ‘man overboard’?

From our UK edition

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until that happy day, the RYA has issued a slim volume,  Inclusive Language Guidance, with a sort of phrasebook thrown in. A sample is: ‘Ze went sailing yesterday. Zir boat is green. That boat belongs to zem.’ This indicates not that the speaker is German, or perhaps from Somerset, but that the person being spoken about has chosen those strange pronouns as zir own.