I've seen the word "sandbore" on charts, and I've seen the term "sandbore" used in Sailnet articles as something to avoid when navigating. I cannot find the term in the dictionary. What is a "sandbore?" Why do you have to avoid it? How big is it? And will it eat much if the kids bring one home?
Dan Dickison responds:
Thanks for your question. If you're contemplating bringing a sandbore home, then you better have a rather large home. Sandbore, or at least the reference for it that we think you're asking about, is a channel and a small island just off the coast of Belize in Central America. There's also a Sandbore Channel in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, and probably a few more elsewhere that we're not aware of.
Regarding the reference for sandbore that you've seen in SailNet articles, I can only plead editorial ignorance. I've checked several of the most obvious articles and couldn't find the instances that you mention, but I suspect that we must have misspelled the word "sandbar," which is probably what we intended to use. Mea culpa.
Now the reference to the word appearing on charts is more befuddling. We've never encountered that reference on a navigational chart, but don't doubt that it might exist. It's likely that some cartographer somewhere decided that a sandbar whose mass had been changed to allow access through it, could be accurately referred to as a "sandbore."
Now that we've gone out on a limb with these thoughts, most likely some wordsmith will weigh in with a better, more accurate explanation, and we'll all be the wiser. If not, here's hoping that the above information at least partially answers your question.
