ABSTRACT
The rise of contemporary thalassography, or sea writing, from a broad range of perspectives attests to the role that engagement with the sea has on individual and collective identity, one’s sense of place and the nature of one’s relationship with the world. Being on/in the sea is to enter into a relationship with it. The ‘quality’ or nature of this relationship is clearly open to debate. There is a growing body of literature that has drawn on direct embodied engagement with the sea to explicate the role that the sea plays in shaping identity. Auto-ethnography provides a methodological approach that allows to better understand and analyse the ‘connections between personal embodied nature-based experiences, culture and nature’. Issues of identity, associated attitudes and the potential for developing a proactive environmental stance lie at the core of these brief auto-ethnographic accounts of sailing.
