Boatslength

Those children would grow up to be puffballs too, they’d take up half a boatslength between them.

A beamy shoal-draft hull like ours does not shoot far into the wind, but the dead man was no more than three boatslengths off; […]

Again we managed to pull ahead a bit each time we came together and by the first mark we rounded several boatslengths in the lead.