Day 448: December 22, 2025 – At Sea, near Bora Bora
Before this adventure, I had no idea what cabotage or bunkering meant. These days, I speak a whole new language.
- Aft: rear of a ship.
- Bed Risers: an accessory used to elevate the height of a bed, to increase storage space in a cabin. A much-discussed topic on this ship.
- Bow: the front of a ship.
- Bridge: principal control center where officers manage ship operations.
- Bunkering: supplying fuel to ship.
- Cabin Crawl: an event where residents tour each other’s cabins.
- Cabotage: transport of goods or passengers between two points within the same country by a foreign vessel. Impacts where we can/cannot embark/disembark.
- Code Alpha: medical emergency on board.
- Dry Dock: a specialized structure that holds ships out of the water for maintenance, inspection, and repair.
- Embark/Disembark: to get on or off the ship.
- Fore: forward part of a ship.
- Gangway: movable bridge or ramp that connects ship to land.
- Knot: a unit of speed used to measure the speed of ships. Equals to one nautical mile per hour.
- Manifest: a document that details everything a ship carries, including passengers.
- Mules: specialized locomotives that help guide ships through the Panama Canal (or other locks).
- Muster Station: a designated area where passengers gather during an emergency.
- Pilot Boat: a small boat that takes maritime pilots to vessels arriving or departing at a port, to help with navigation. Some ports require a pilot boat, others don’t.
- Pollywogs: a sailor who has never crossed the equator yet.
- Porthole: a round window on a ship.
- Portside: the left side of a vessel when facing the front.
- Port Days: days when the ship docks in a port (rather than being at sea).
- Port Manning: a maritime requirement to have a minimum number of crew on ship while docked in a port.
- Port of Call: a place where a ship stops on a voyage.
- Residents: what passengers are called on the Odyssey (since we live here).
- Reverse Osmosis: a water filtration technology that uses membranes to remove salts and impurities from seawater to create fresh water.
- Stabilizer: a device designed to minimize a ship’s side-to-side motion caused by rough seas.
- Shellback: A sailor who has crossed the equator.
- Stand Clear, Stand Well Clear: a safety warning to move a safe distance away from automated or heavy doors on a ship that get shut remotely in an emergency. We’ve heard it so often, at every drill, we can recite it in our sleep.
- Starboard: the right side of a ship when facing the front.
- Stern: the rear of a ship.
- Sea day: a day when the ship is not in a port.
- Sail-away: the action of a ship leaving a harbor.
- Tender: a small boat used to transport passengers from a larger vessel that is anchored offshore.
- Villa: what a cabin is called on the Odyssey.
- Zodiac: an inflatable motorized boat.
And here are a few more informal things I’ve learned, some from my shipmates:
- Bather: Ozzie for swimsuit.
- Belfastians: those of us who have been on the ship from the beginning, since Belfast.
- Berth family: our adopted family on board.
- Bing-Bong or Ding-Dong: the attention signal the PA system makes when we’re about to hear an announcement.
- Pizza: our code word for “this conversation is getting too raunchy.”
- Touron: a tourist who doesn’t listen to rules and puts themselves and others in danger (tourist+moron). Every cruise ship has one.
- Twitcher: British for birder.
- Walking the Plank: in pirate legend, a method of disposing of unwanted prisoners when a ship was seized, by forcing them to walk down a plank extended over the ocean. Used by passengers to refer to people they find annoying.
- Piss Pub: overheard from one of the Brits or Ozzies; still trying to figure out how it differs from a regular pub.
And finally, don’t ever call a cruise ship a boat. It offends the purist shipmates amongst us; they will make you walk the plank!
11 responses to “My New Vocabulary”
Just a thought: Historically, some pubs had a trough below the bar so patrons could relieve themselves without leaving their pint. Some of those kind of pubs still exist. Perhaps that is what a piss pub is?
Otherwise, great collection of terms!
Every ship is a boat. Not every boat is a ship.
The key difference between a ship and a boat is that a ship can carry a boat, but a boat cannot hold a ship.
Keelhauling is a good addition.
Villa Days – Days in port when you stay on the ship.
Ha! Tell that to the folks on board, who bristle when anyone calls the Odyssey a “boat”! I hadn’t heard of keelhauling, had to Google it, waiting for that to get implemented on this boat! I mean, ship. 🤣
So informative thank you. Helpful for a new boat person.
You’re welcome!
A nautical mile is 6076ft (1/60 of a degree of latitude), so a nautical mile is about 15% larger than a statute (landlubber) mile, so a knot is about 15% faster than a mph.
Port is on the left, because “port” and “left” have the same number of letters. Ships and airplanes display a red light on their left side, because port wine is red. (And right/starboard/green is the side that isn’t left/port/red.) Probably apocryphally, the word “posh” is said to be an acronym for Port Out, Starboard Home, referring to the preferred cabins for trips to India, the cabins facing north for the journey.
One definition is that a boat is a floating thing that you can pick up and put on a ship. USS Cole is a US Navy Arleigh Burke destroyer, 505ft long and weighing around 8000 tons. (By way of contrast, Odyssey is 642ft and 24,000 tons.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#/media/File:MV_Blue_Marlin_carrying_USS_Cole.jpg is a picture of USS Cole atop MV Blue Marlin, being transported for repairs after an attack. Therefore, USS Cole is a boat. Q.E.D.
Hmmm… I’m going to take issue with #1. Just as fore is forward, aft is rearward or toward the rear, and as you’ve said, the stern is the rear.
Love the Brit- and Ozzie-isms! 🙂
Technically it’s true that aft is a direction, while stern is a location. In reality, very few people on this ship know the difference, and use the terms interchangeably. Well maybe with the exception of the hard-core sailors among us.
Yes, location vs. direction. You said that so much better than I!
I remember on my Windjammer adventures, each time someone said “boat” our captain would respond, “It’s a f*king ship!”
Yep, that’s kind of what you’ll hear around here! I’ve never quite understood why it elicits such a visceral reaction, but some people feel very strongly about it, so best to be careful!