Word: flotilla
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...million Americans went down to the sea in 5,971,000 powerboats and sailboats, spent $1.25 billion on their hobby; this year they will spend $1.5 billion, and add another 500,000 craft to the U.S. pleasure fleet. From Maine to California's Newport-Balboa harbor, where a flotilla of 7,000 yachts worth $30 million lies at anchor, the nation's shorelines, lakes and waterways are dotted with boats; on the Great Lakes, the Detroit area alone counts 100,000; uncounted thousands more skim across the enormous man-made lakes formed by dam projects in the Tennessee...
...over into the mud flats and inundating the clay-and-sand islands that dotted its shallows. The rising water level created its own hazards. Grazing lands were flooded, and immense expanses of papyrus set adrift. In the course of one howling storm, 16 Kotoko fishermen in a four-boat flotilla were driven into a field of floating papyrus and held captive by the sinewy stems. The crew of one boat managed to cut their way out of the papyrus jungle when they drifted into shallow water; the other crews and their boats were never seen again...
...passage by capturing the shore. On the morning of April 25, 1915, 60,000 Allied troops headed toward the Dardanelles peninsula in the first great amphibious land assault of modern times. In an age when armored landing craft were practically unknown, British, French and Anzacs went ashore in a flotilla of paddle steamers, trawlers, yachts and river tugs. Scarcely a naval gun boomed to soften up the Turkish beaches before them: the warships at Gallipoli were too busy transporting the troops. The result was carnage. At Cape Helles the Turks began "firing from a few yards away into the packed...
From this unlikely material Novelist Hugh Hickling has distilled a parable of man at war and an odd, rapt bit of poetry of the sea. There are no storms, either of men or of elements, as the clumsy LCT flotilla makes its way from the Firth of Clyde to its appointment with history on the beaches of Normandy. Personalities clash, but, as they must under the imperatives of war, such clashes collapse inconclusively...
...enjoy the rippling piano notes (actually played by Carmen Cavallaro) that made Duchin a society favorite during the '30s, and there is one pleasant scene in which Power plays a duet with a small Chinese boy during his wartime tour of duty as operations officer of a destroyer flotilla...