My email quote-of-the-day source sends along a little ditty that I find quite amusing and thought my fellow port-swillers with a taste for the nautical might enjoy as well:

Me father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light,

And he slept with a mermaid one fine night.

From this union there came three:

A porpoise, and a porgy, and the other was me!

Yo-ho-ho, the wind blows free,

Oh, for the life on the rolling sea!

One night, as I was a-trimmin’ of the glim,*

Singing a verse of the evening hymn,

A voice on the starboard shouted, “Ahoy!”

And there was my mother, a-sitting on a buoy.

Yo-ho-ho….

“Oh what has become of my children three?”

My mother then she asked of me.

“One was exhibited as a talking fish;

The other was served on a chafing dish.”

Yo-ho-ho….

Then the phosphorous flashed in her seaweed hair.

I looked again and my mother wasn’t there.

But her voice came echoing back from the night,

“To Hell with the keeper of the Eddystone Light!”

Yo-ho-ho, the wind blows free,

Oh, for the life on the rolling sea!

– “Me Father Was the Keeper of the Eddystone Light”

(traditional English sea-faring ballad)

Yo, ho, ho!