Word: schooner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...August afternoon in 2008, Ted Kennedy took John Kerry sailing on his 50-ft. schooner, the Mya.It was a perfect day on the water, sunny with the occasional cotton-ball cloud riding the strong winds over the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. With the Mya's blue hull moving at a good clip, Kennedy turned to his old friend with reminiscences of failed campaigns past: Kennedy's bid for the presidency in 1980 and Kerry's in 2004. What concerned Kennedy, who three months earlier had learned he had a malignant brain tumor, was legacy - Kerry's legacy...
...target of a kidnapping scheme. When Mickey disappears - and Shasta too - the lovelorn Doc, with quantities of superior weed, plunges into a many-layered plot. It involves, among other things, the LAPD, organized crime, disorganized crime, a lecherous dentist and the Golden Fang, which is sometimes a mysterious schooner, sometimes a no-nonsense drug cartel. Pynchonesque multitudes crowd into the picture. Tight-lipped federales, stoner lawyers, ex-con neo-Nazis with a big thing for show tunes - they tumblesault in every page or two, each bearing, maybe, a piece of the puzzle. (See a 2006 TIME article on Pynchon...
...novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies - recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize - crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese - and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk. Language animates the Ibis, as well it should: loaded with migrants, opium...
...RAJA LAUT: With a name meaning "king of the seas" in Malay, Raja Laut is an ironwood schooner that plies the waters of peninsular Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. Its six beautiful cabins accommodate up to 12 guests, who are waited on by a multiracial crew that could have stepped out of the pages of Conrad's Lord Jim (indeed, literature buffs can follow in the great author's wake, voyaging through Borneo, Brunei and Sarawak on an itinerary based on his travels). Trips can include spectacular diving, visiting deserted islands with steep karst formations worthy of a James Bond movie...
...Such grandiose fancies are usually discarded when the footloose dreamer returns home, where the demands of "real" life make themselves known. Yet for two decades, Beale inwardly nourished his obsession, and now it has taken on hardwood reality: Beale's reconstruction of the eighth century Indonesian schooner depicted at Borobudur is now under sail in the Indian Ocean, on its way to Africa, manned by a multinational crew. The 19-meter-long ship is retracing the route of its ancient prototypes, which are believed to have formed the earliest transoceanic sailing fleet in history...