Does anyone know where the word gunkholing originated? I have seen it in a number of sailing and mariner publications. I can't seem to find it in any on-line dictionaries.

Here's a URL about gunkholing:http://www.stella67.com/gunk/gunk.html

The site would not let me copy the definition given.

I am so excited! I just read about this word this very day at lunch, while I was reading through a 25-year-old book on Canadian English. I'd never heard it before. Here's what my book had to say:

gunk hole - (marked in the Dictionary of Canadianisms as a localism) 'tiny cove with deep water right to the shore'; thus to gunk-hole is to move from one such cove to another, fishing and idling.

Talk about serendipity!

(From Our Own Voice: Canadian English and how it came to be, R. E. McConnell, Gage Publishing Limited, Toronto, 1978.)

Dear Chopped Liver-I-mean-Bean , that was serendipitous indeed. I notice the guy in the link simply says gunkholing is a boat tour around San Francisco. Is there a word with xyz-centric that means place oriented, as egocentric and temporocentric mean self- and time-oriented?
grahamknox, welcome aBoard.

I must add that the fellow uses another of my favourite Canadian words in that webpage, except not with the western-Canadian definition I am accustomed to: slough (pronounced sloo where I come from). This is a word which has a very specific meaning on the prairies, and it means something like "a low, marshy area on the prairies, which is full of water in wet years and dries up completely in drought years". From what I understand, in areas adjacent to the ocean, slough means something like salt water lagoons next to the ocean, and may be pronounced differently.

Just thought I'd share that little bit of western-Canadian vocabulary with y'all. (This could be a self-YART, but if it is, the first pass was a very long time ago...maybe no one else will notice...)

From what I understand, in areas adjacent to the ocean, slough means something like salt water lagoons next to the ocean, and may be pronounced differently.

We've got a slew of sloughs here in the San Francisco Bay area, and they're pronounced just as you folks in the Great White North pronounce them. Out here, by the Big Water, a slough is a a creek running through a marshland or a tidal flat. In fact, we might use the term to describe the creek so beautifully described by Señorita de Troy the other day (I didn't comment on it in that thread, Helen, but it was gorgeous).

Note: I just clicked on the link provided by Dr. Bill, and I see that, at no charge whatsoever to you loyal readers, I have explained more than was strictly necessary.