Boathook

[bunn]

I just had a moment of 'how do you spell boathook, does it have a hyphen' and googled it.   And was disconcerted to see lots of photos of boathooks with nice safe round blobs on the end of the fending-off spike and the hook.

I just wrote a story in which someone wields a boathook as a weapon (hence the belated doubtful googling) and so this disconcerted me.  I had a clear idea of the sort of boathook I meant, which is the sort that my Dad owned, which was an object you could quite easily kill someone with, possibly by accident.

I had to google some more to discover that I wasn't misremembering the configuration of old boathooks. I remember it as basically a spear with a barb.


Not me.

What is the spike for?  I've always wondered this (particularly when my sister was holding the other end and pointing the sharp bit at me. Oh, how we laughed).  Why did it used to be so sharp? (Pirates? :-D )

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. But what if the competent people have small, perilous daughters who steal the boathook and use it to menace one another? WHAT THEN

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Then clearly they're not all that competent, or they wouldn't have raised a duffer :-)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Well, we never did drown, I suppose.