What does Fair Winds and Following Seas mean?
” Fair Winds and Following Seas ” is a sailor’s blessing to someone they care about, wishing them favourable conditions on their voyage.
Fair Winds to fill your sails and Following Seas with the ocean waves and current moving in the same direction as your ship.
If you get your speed right, it can feel like surfing smoothly along, as you are held in the wave and leads to a very comfortable, smooth and swift passage.
This is a stark contrast to pounding with the bow into the waves, with the ship seeming to shudder into pieces around you, being rocked from side to side in seasick inducing rough seas.
It is perhaps the finest sailing condition that you can hope to get and I’m sure that any sailor who’s white knuckled through rough seas would be grateful for the good conditions.
The origin of “ Fair Winds and Following Seas ”
The exact origin of this maritime saying is as mysterious as the sea itself…
Sailors are however a superstitious bunch and in the days when communication and letters could take years to catch up to the sailors, wishing someone “Fair Winds and Following Seas” as a send off and perhaps as a prayer that they would get to their destination in peace …
It is as logical as it is sweet… *ehem- * for rough and tumble sailors that is, of course.
There are rumours that the Hawaiian phrase “Makani ‘olu’olu e kai malie” is in a loose translation “Fair Winds and Following Seas” *,but I am waiting on confirmation from a few reputable sources on this.*
That would make a lot of sense.
The people with perhaps the longest consecutive history of seafaring were the people who first colonized the Polynesian islands in their voyage into the Great Unknown.
For generations, mothers and fathers wished their children well and blessed them, as they pushed their canoes with outrigger and sails out into the ocean, to see what was beyond the reef.
It took courage and grit to go willingly into the deep blue beyond and it is just about as simple and yet powerful and respectful of a saying as a tough sailor is going to get.
Philosophically speaking, for a moment if you please
This saying is a personal favourite of mine and one I appreciate deeply, all the more now for having done the research for this article…
As sailors, we are at the mercy of the sea.
We often find ourselves in the extreme middle of nowhere, at times walking a fine line between life and death.
What are we, in the middle of that vast blue expanse, but for our wits and our ship at the mercy of the ocean?
Or perhaps the author should lay off the rum?
So that’s your lot.
And unironically this time, because now we can appreciate the full weight of this blessing…
“Fair Winds and Following Seas”,
Until we meet again, remember that, “Life Begins Where Land Ends”.
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