A fight is like the perfect storm. It is risky and dangerous. But, as the African proverb goes, Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. Fights are often learning opportunities— if we're willing to dig deep enough past our own egos.

And now you're off to Port Caynn. Watch them sailor lads. They'll have your skirts up and a babe in your belly afore you know what you're about.Everyone keep warning me about sailors, I complained. Why can't someone tell the sailors to stay clear of me?Granny snorted. Oh, you're the fierce one now! Just take care no one else catches you unawares and knocks you on the nob!

There are no whores in Scaithe's Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight— and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man's affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

A sailor chooses the wind that takes the ship from a safe port. Ah, yes, but once you're abroad, as you have seen, winds have a mind of their own. Be careful, Charlotte, careful of the wind you choose.

A sailor is not defined as much by how many seas he has sailed than by how many storms he has overcome.