The Rime of the Aging Mariner

Position: 45°37’34″N 122°39’25″W

Note: No albatrosses were harmed in the making of this blog.

The ocean is salty and that salt gets everywhere on board. It gets into the rigging, the sails, the stores, and even the language. On a sunny day in the Med the wind can pick up quickly. In a good blow, say anything over 25 knots, the spray becomes obnoxious. Whipped off the waves, fine seawater droplets dry on contact, leaving behind salt to build up in layers like a hoar frost, or worse creep quietly into all the boat’s crevices where it causes nothing but problems.

Most observably it cakes every surface in a white, crusty, sticky powder In theory we could go forward and collect it, then take it below and add it to our soup, or unsalted butter. Perhaps we could package it up for sale under the brand, “Ishmael’s Sea Salt, harvested by hand – from the ship’s rigging by hand.”

Nerd Moment

Simple salt, sodium chloride, NaCl, has no electric charge. The positive sodium ions balance out the negative chlorine ions. That’s all fine and good until it works its way between two different metals. Then all hell lets loose.

You see, Galvanic corrosion occurs when metals with different electrical potentials (like the stainless-steel screws you drilled into your aluminum mast) connect in the presence of an electrolyte (salt water). Without an insulator, the metal rots away. When it does, parts fly off the boat, beaning you when they do. Salty language ensues.

The good news is salt washes away with copious amounts of fresh water. Whether it comes directly from the heavens or out the end of a hose, Aleta cares not. Just give her and all her surfaces a good dousing and dissolve that corrosive stuff away.

Arrgh!

There is a reason that sailors are called ‘salts’. In the days of square riggers, salt not only caked sailor’s outsides, it lined their insides, too. Salt beef and salt pork were the staples of the Jolly Jack Tar’s diet. That along with weevils, rats and grog, sailors of yore had a completely balanced diet. The moniker ‘old salt’ is reserved for wizened, sea hardened sailors with lots of experience. No one on Aleta fits that description, yet.

Because salt is so inextricably bound to sailing life, indeed to life itself, here are some of the other ways our culture is engrained with it:

Literature

Melville summed up life for the crew of Aleta in the first few paragraphs of Moby Dick: “…no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.”

Pliny the Elder loved the stuff: “By Hercules, then, life cannot be lived humanely without salt—it is such an essential substance that its name is transferred to powerful mental pleasures too. All the charm and the greatest humor of life, along with rest from work, are called salts (sales)…” That use of the term has faded from use – just ask Captain Haddock.

Religion

In Aztec mythology, Huixtocihuatl is the fertility goddess whose dominion is salt and salt water. Lot’s wife, on the other hand, was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back on Sodom and Gomorrah. I wonder if she back looked on Las Vegas what would have happened? Jesus referred to his followers as the salt of the earth. Not to be confused with salting the earth to poison it after a battle (which probably should be in the economics section).

Superstition

Spilling salt has always been bad luck. Just ask Judas Iscariot. Leonardo da Vinci highlighted Judas’s unlucky mojo by painting the famous 13^th(!) guest knocking over a cellar of salt during the melee that occurred when it came time to split the bill at the Last Supper.

To counteract the bad juju of spilling salt, I was taught to take a pinch of the spilled salt in my right hand and cast it over my left shoulder, thus blinding the devil. And to make a wish while I did it. Throwing it over your right shoulder with your left hand only encourages Beelzebub, so don’t do that. I was also instructed to, “Clean up that bloody mess when you’re done buggering about!” [sic].

Economics

The Romans coined the term salary (from the Latin salārius, salt). Then there was the Salarian Way whence the Sabines came to the mouth of the Tiber and collected salt from the marshes. One of many salt roads in the ancient world.

Language

Salty language: There is a range of coarseness from Captain Haddock’s benign expletives (q.v.) to the tedium of dull stand-up comedians whose only titters come after an f-bomb. George Carlin had the best explanation of what’s considered salty and what’s not in America. See it here.

Puns: There are salt boxes for storing salt and there are saltboxes for storing people.

Dad Jokes:

• What’s the difference between a grain of salt and Sean Connery? One is an ionic bond, the other an iconic Bond.
• Fanny: We’re out of salt! Freddy: 0mg!
• I wanted to tell you a joke about salt, but then I was like, Na!

Popular Culture: There is nothing so sublime as the antics of Cap, Spike, and Salty Sam:

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