At 10 a.m., as David Blinken piloted his gurgling 16-foot flats skiff out of Accabonac Harbor here and into Gardiner's Bay, the moon was still suspended overhead -- a pale yellow cap hanging on a rack of thin blue sky.
"I'd say, 'We've been doing it since the day the settlers first showed up,' " Mr. Choke said as he steered an aluminum skiff out of Shilshole Bay on an overcast afternoon recently.
A few arm their boats with anti-aircraft guns big enough to blow an approaching pirate skiff out of the water.Jolly Roger, Somali-styleWhile these so-called "bio-pirates" strip Africa's waters of a valuable and sustainable resource, the more conventional pirates terrorise one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
Mr. Wall's Hammer Time is a 17-foot-long, 800-horsepower descendant of the garveys and skiffs of Prohibition days.
The battered skiffs of the pirates, contrasted with the sheer size of their target, the Maersk Alabama, provide as vivid a picture of the idea of asymmetrical conflict as you could ask for.
Whether it is the ultimate genius or jest of our biology that it seems to strand us on the very surface of its makeup -- rendering us little skiffs of awareness atop our inwardly roiling, reticular entrails -- we all live and, perhaps, can only go from day to day in a kind of ongoing, airily dismissed story -- or film -- of being alive.
Among the premiere crowd, which included Ms. Murphy as well as HOLLY HUNTER and KATHY BATES, Mr. Livingston was, in his own words, "a lone skiff on a sea of estrogen".
On page 4, we meet Auguste, the young man employed to carry around Monet's easel and paints and, on this particular morning, to sit in the back of a skiff, bored out of his mind and dreaming of lunch, while Monet sits in the front, staring into the water and occasionally dabbing at a canvas.
