seawife

1. (rare) The wife of a fisherman or sailor.Examples: "Moreover they are informed that the only Ward family living on the island is “Selkie” and his seawife, and “Selkie” was their great-great-grandfather, dead for a hundred years. / Eventually, after encounters with various people whose behaviour they cannot understand, they find “Selkie”, his seawife and their seven children. […] The seawife legend, versions of which are still told in the Orkneys and elsewhere, haunts this tale of the Ward boys on their Johnsmass eve journey home."; "As each contraction built, swelled, broke, and subsided, I had begun to feel like an old seawife on the shore listening to the boom and smack of waves rolling in from an offshore storm, knowing (from the tales of survivors) what was happening out there to the old man on the boat, but unable to do a thing about it. One holding a light against the beating darkness, knowing only for sure that at some point this violence rolling and breaking beyond and beneath would yield up—well, would yield up something: in the seawife’s case, maybe this time the mute tangle of rope and wood, a broken pot, something facedown and smashed, but with the normal combination of luck and skill—hadn’t this happened many times before?—once more the boat and the old man who would require no more than a hand at the last moment, a rope caught, the boat secured and then home for supper…yes, I felt like that old seawife that night."; "Out of the total of fifty boats surveyed on practical aspects of seamanship and long distance cruising, forty had a seawife on board. I use the term ‘seawife’ loosely, as the forty ladies concerned included not only wives, but also girlfriends, mothers and independent women cruising on their own terms. […] Wherever possible I tried to talk to the seawives on their own, but when this was not possible, I firmly asked their skipper not to interfere."rare