Even though summer has sailed into the sunset, your local word-Smith still has boating on the brain.

It all started weeks ago, when Webb’s Weird Words chose to honor sailing season — along with this summer’s 50th anniversary of Jaws — by looking at vocab related to watercraft.

After no less than three articles on such terms as keel, killick and coxswain, I put my newfound expertise to the test by reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Set in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars, these books were long overdue for me, as O’Brian’s 21-title saga is widely considered the finest series of historical novels ever written.

So I’ve just finished the first entry — Master and Commander, originally published in 1969. And while I loved every page, I noted more than a dozen additional sailing terms that didn’t make my earlier articles: brail, chesstree, gregale, grego, lateen, polacre, puddening, roband, strake, tompion, topgallant (usually rendered t’gallant) — and my favorite: xebec.

And on top of that, Master proffered over 20 other oddball terms largely unrelated to sailing: ablation, castoreum, demulcent, grallatorial, hemidemisemiquaver, holothurian, lycosid, phantasmata, poteen, rencounter, roborative, sempiternal, senna, shoneen, squill, tramontana, tumefaction and vaticinate.

I know I’m on the right track here, as my Microsoft program just red-lined seven of these — meaning it doesn’t recognize them as actual words!

However — while summer has indeed sailed over the horizon — I happen to be on vacation these first two weeks of September; and for definitions, I’d rather not dig into all these terms without my handy collection of dictionaries. (In other words, I don’t wish to rely solely on the internet.)

So while I’m waiting to be reunited with my bookshelves — which is frankly not too tough from Moab, Sedona and the Grand Canyon — let me take a few paragraphs to sing the praises of O’Brian and his first installment.

While there is indeed a focus on wartime sailing, the books are beloved even by non-boaters — because of their wide-ranging subject matter. Yes, the battles are action-packed and bracingly authentic — but the works are grounded in the companionable friendship of Capt. Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. The two are so different that one might compare their deep-seated bond with that of Holmes and Watson — or perhaps Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Both Aubrey and Maturin are music-lovers — so the novels also cover that topic, along with vivid expertise on 19th-century medical practice.

It likewise happens that Maturin has an ongoing fascination with the natural world, so the tales are leavened with a good deal of this, too; in the tenth book, for instance, Aubrey’s ship makes a pre-Darwin visit to the Galapagos islands.

Film fans might recall that episode from the sensational 2003 movie Master and Commander. Starring Russell Crowe as Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Maturin, that gem shares its subtitle — The Far Side of the World — with O’Brian’s 10th novel, though it’s not based strictly on either of the books. Unhappily, while Crowe and Bettany are perfectly cast, this costly movie — directed by the talented Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society) — did not make enough money to justify further adaptations from the series.

O’Brian also covers geography, conscience, old-time food & drink, childbirth, history, affairs of the heart (largely because Aubrey is a shameless womanizer) and even the sort of falsely polite dialog, loaded with underhanded snubs and power-plays, that one finds in Jane Austen — who wrote, incidentally, in the same era.

So there’s something here for just about everyone — if you can adjust to the complex terminology.

And if not: Wait a week or two, and I’ll unpack some of it.