As he gets on in years, my fishin’ buddy Headwind looks for ways to make life easier.

It’s contra-intuitive for someone who earned his nickname by doing everything the hard way, but he’s beginning to accept the proposition that you can only fight aging, not defeat it.

So, Headwind added plastic slick pads to his boat trailer bunks, replaced the stock winch (one gear, 1,250-pound capacity) with a two-gear, 2,500-pound one, gave away the builder-supplied tongue jack with its 5-inch wheel and bought a heftier one with a 7-inch wheel.

“How does that make life easier?” I asked, thinking of “life” as, you know, life itself. Headwind looked as though he wondered if I’m aging worse than he’d thought, but he didn’t say it.

“The slicks let the boat slide off the trailer without being pushed harder than I want to push,” he answered pedantically. “The two-gear higher-load winch makes it easier to crank the boat up, especially on steep ramps at the end of a long day on the water when I’m likely to be a bit weary.

“Sure, I can do it with a one-gear winch, even an undersized one if necessary, but may I remind you that when we fish together you’re usually the one cranking the thing up the incline? “And don’t you remember how hard it was to jackass the rig around on the driveway with the original tongue jack’s 5-inch wheel? This rig is too heavy for that. Thus the 7-incher.” I agreed that those modifications make launching and hauling the boat easier, but asked again how they make life itself easier. Headwind objected to the implication that there’s a difference.

“Launching and hauling a boat are essential elements of fishing, and fishing is life itself. Other than that, life itself is fishing,” he said in a tone that I thought slightly patronizing.

I hesitated to remind Headwind that he is known by that name for good reasons. Who would he be if he favored the easy way? When everyone else’s routine ways and standard procedures are all alike, that indicates to Headwind that nobody’s looking for better ways any more.

Well, nobody but Headwind. If a project doesn’t take him at least twice as long as it takes anyone else, he finds himself guilty of giving it a fast shuffle. When he tries something different and it doesn’t work, that isn’t failure.

It’s just the by-catch of innovation. Still, I guess I get the point about making life and fishing easier. Since retiring from full time employment, Headwind has been figuring out what matters least and what matters most in life, however he decides to define life. He’s done this gradually, discarding one by one whatever activities and interests he thinks he’s had enough of or that he no longer minds doing without. Some folks do that abruptly, which often turns out to mean hastily, and then they are not sure how to correct their courses.

You’re likely to find someone like that in a carport or at a dock, leaning or sitting on his gunwales, contemplating his naval goods. Headwind’s gunwales are narrow. Mine too, so we lean on ours. If yours are wide enough to sit on, that’s probably what you do. For a while after Headwind got his new boat, he tried sitting on the gunwales but it required better balance than he has. He almost fell off backward a couple of times before giving it up.

“In hindsight, that should have almost happened only once — not a couple of times,” he says. “In further hindsight, I should have known better than to let it happen ever.”

Tyro the new guy just asked me what gunwales are. Some kind of firearm accessory? Rarely seen marine mammals? Interruptions are acceptable risk when I write my piece here in the Fish or Cut Bait Society clubhouse.

Sometimes a nosy poke like Tyro will read over my shoulder and blurt a question that I’ve been waiting months for a chance to answer. Before I could speak, Headwind did: “Gunwales are what you call ‘gunnels,’ he told Tyro. “The correct way to spell the elision is ‘gun’ls.’

The word itself is of British sailing origin. So is the elision. As everyone knows, the British invented sailing and its entire vocabulary.” Tyro said he thinks Norsemen and biblical characters were building and sailing boats at least as long ago as Englishmen, and he wonders what those sailors called their gunwales.

Headwind said it doesn’t matter because Norsemen spoke in Scandinavian tongues (they still do) and Bible people spoke Aramaic and other languages he never heard of. None of them make a lick of sense to us, but sometimes English does.

“I think you’re winging it now,” Tyro told Headwind, who confessed and continued. He didn’t think the rest of us noticed he was steering away from the subject of coping with a word we both dislike: Aging. That’s why most Headwind watchers think he’s looking for easier, not harder, ways to do things.

Recently he complained that this column type, 9.5-point Slimbach Book, is too small. The most common news font is 8-point. He’s noticed that in the many years he’s known me, I’ve raised my writing type from 14-point Times Roman all the way up to 20-point. He only talks privately about that.

Still leading the easily distracted Tyro offstream, he instructed him that it’s improper to call a rope a rope, especially when it’s on a boat.

There ropes are called lines, unless they are used to adjust sails, in which case they are called sheets, Headwind taught. “Ropes are sheets and sails are not?” Tyro wondered. “Avast with the blather. Take notes,” Headwind admonished him. “If you buy a sail, the salesman marks the transaction on a sales sheet. Lines are stashed in a rope locker. The one you take out to fasten to a boat’s bow cleat is a bow line. That’s two words.”

Tyro wondered if it’s bow as in curtsy or bow as in fiddle. Headwind said it’s curtsy. Tyro, fully lost now, thanked him courteously.thanked him courteously.

Tyro said he still doesn’t understand why a certain nautical knot is called a bowline, one word pronounced “bowlin’” as if it were vernacular for a game of tenpins. Headwind asked Tyro if he knows what a bowlin’ on a bight is. He pronounced bight “bit” instead of “bight” because that’s how he learned it about 80 years ago, so it must be correct. “You are trying to confuse me,” Tyro accused and Headwind confessed again.

Other than that (Headwind went on), a bight is a bend in a coastline, forming a sort of bay. There’s a bunch of those in Florida Bay — Snake Bight, Rankin Bight and Garfield Bight for example.

Down here, “bite” is the common way to say it but it isn’t necessarily correct. Once long ago, a redfish expert giving a talk at the clubhouse told us that Snake Bight is called Snake Bite “because it looks like a big humongous snake came along and took a big bite out of it.” Our laughter surprised him. He thought he was being informative, not funny. “I still don’t understand,” said Tyro.

“That’s good,” Headwind answered. “You’re not supposed to understand.” Tyro told him to call if he wants help doing anything else the easy way.

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