I am a huge fan of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The contest is a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. If you are not acquainted with Edward Bulwer-Lytton, he was the English novelist who in 1830 penned the classic first phrase to the first sentence of the novel Paul Clifford which begins: “It was a dark and stormy night …” In all fairness, Bulwer-Lytton gets a bad rap. He also coined other memorable phrases including “the great unwashed“, “pursuit of the almighty dollar“, and “the pen is mightier than the sword.” All the same, the contest is great fun.
Every year contestants attempt to pen opening sentences that are so bad that they are good, or if not good, at least amusing. Here are the winners with a nautical focus from this year’s contest.
Winner, Adventure:
After weeks at sea, Captain Fetherstonhaugh and his hardy crew had at last crossed the halfway point, and he mused that the closest dry land now lay in the Americas, assuming of course that it was not raining there. David Laatsch, Baton Rouge, LA
This afternoon, the 
It is official. The polar research ship formerly known as Boaty McBoatface will be named RRS Sir David Attenborough. Despite an overwhelming number of suggestions that the UK’s new polar research ship be named Boaty McBoatface, 
HMS Caroline
The news has been full of announcements about the discovery of Captain Cook’s 
After more than a half-century, American cruise passengers have returned to Cuba. Carnival Corporation’s 
The 
A 
This is an updated repost from 2014. Now that it has been announced that 
Last year, 
In 1981, Ngoc Nguyen was 13, one of the at least 800,000 of the so-called 
“Bubble Man”