Kayak Fishing (Actually a Complaint About the British System of Units)

I went kayak fishing with my uncle on Saturday at a man-made island about 1 km of the Ventura coast.

I am glad to use the metric system to describe things. It is so much easier to deal with once you learn it.

Metric System Example: 1000 meters = 1 kilometer

Conversions in the Metric System are elegantly simple. You just need a basic understanding of the decimal system and a couple prefixes and you are set for life. Not too difficult.

British System Example: 5280 feet = 1 mile

What an ugly and arbitrary conversion. This site gives a history of the unit of a mile:

One mile was the distance of a thousand paces: in Latin, mille passus. A pace being 5 feet gives a mile of roughly 5000 feet. The mile acquired its current value of 5280 feet (1760 yards) by the decree of the English parliament during the reign of Elizabeth I. Since this was a legal definition it became known as the statute mile — statute being another word for law.

For the sake of my story about how far the island is offshore,

1 kilometer = 0 .6213 miles (for fairness to the British System let's simplify it to 2/3)

and every American Soccer Mom and Joe Sixpack knows that

2/3 mile = 3520 feet

and every high school graduate in the United States knows that

3520 feet = 1173 1/3 yards

and every NFL player knows

1173 1/3 yards = 9.8 Football Fields (from goal post to goal post).

Finally we have a system of units that everyone can understand and I can finally talk about kayak fishing. But our friends everywhere else in the world won't understand, because what they rightly call "football", a sport that primarily uses the feet, is really "soccer" in America. It is no surprise that the American sport is poorly named.

I am now too tired to write about fishing.



Why didn't I just skip that whole exercise and do this right from the start?