By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter

Ahoy, ye sea rovers and scalliwags! Thursday be the day old salts and young be rollin’ every “Arrrr!” and speakin’ of hoistin’ colors and keepin’ a weather eye on the horizon.

Yes, Thursday is International Talk Like a Pirate Day — time to break out exclamations of “Shiver me timbers!” and the mournful plea, “Why is the rum always gone?”

The informal celebration of buccaneer lingo and corsair chatter was inspired June 5, 1995, by John Baur and Mark Summers, who were ruining a game of racquetball in Oregon. As their play got worse, the two men began hurling piratical encouragements.

Once the game ended, they decided to commemorate the event with International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Thinking the June date was too close to D-Day, they moved the celebration to Sept. 19, the birthday of Summers’s ex-wife.

Once Miami Herald syndicated columnist Dave Barry wrote about the silly holiday, celebrations began cropping up worldwide among would-be Jack Sparrows and Long John Silvers. Now parties are mapped out on the founders’ website, www.talklikeapirate.com.

For some, the fascination with pirates goes back to childhood.

“I’m not sure there was much of a choice in the matter,” said Andrew Reyes, a post-production coordinator in Hollywood.

“When I look at the earliest photos of me as a wee infant, what do I see on the wall but aged wallpaper with pirate ships and old nautical compasses. It was like being surrounded on all four sides (by) a huge pirate treasure map,” he said.

He saw the edge of those seas firsthand as a child growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, where his home town, Corpus Christi, had an annual Buccaneer Days festival honoring the pirate Jean Lafitte who headquartered there.

But Reyes soon became intrigued by a different pirate, the legendary Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.

“What was always so fascinating about him to me is that although he was the most fearsome of all the pirates to roam the seas, he spurned the use of force,” Reyes said. “What he used far more successfully was image and perception.”

Teach horrified his opponents by igniting incense and webbing it into his hair. “The projection of Blackbeard could cripple far more men in fear than all the cannons of the Queen’s Navy,” Reyes said. “Why waste bullets or dull a cutlass when the very sight of you will take the very courage from your opponent?”

Ironically, Blackbeard’s crew admired their captain, “and there are no reported cases of him ever harming or murdering his captives. Amazing stuff!” Reyes said.

Another scalliwag is Ruieta Dasilva, a Bay Area resident whose name often is seen in Pixar movie credits. She, too, dreamed she would grow up to be a pirate.

“I would be good at it. I am always in the same clothes, I can sleep anywhere … Love the water, love jewels, can break into things, like travel and adventures overall,” she summarized her qualifications.

As a child growing up in Goa, India, she was allowed to wander where she chose. “I would steal mangos and even better, people’s pickles from old ceramic jars — but never jewels,” she said, though she confessed to filching change from her parents.

Aye, love of pirates has spread to every U.S. shore, and beyond. Tampa, Fla., has celebrated piracy for more than 100 years with its Gasparilla Pirate Festival.

Many a would-be buccaneer, privateer and sea dog have found “Under the Black Flag,” a website that was launched in Greece by two brothers, Captain Jake Lankster and Captain Black.

One of their members is author Andrea Jones, who “commandeered” the pirates of Neverland to create her award-winning “Hook and Jill” series of novels, “because J.M. Barrie’s characters are too enduring to maroon them when we abandon childhood,” she said by email this week.

Jones explained, “Hook is THE literary pirate, and has become symbolic in our culture as the quintessential captain.” In fact, the Pirate of the Year trophy from Pirate Magazine is a gleaming pirate hook.

Some of her favorite pirate phrases came from exclamations Barrie wrote for Hook: “Split my infinitives!” and “Prepare to meet thy doom!”

She has five books in her version of the Captain Hook story, noted on her website, www.HookandJill.com.

Benicia has had its own author with piratical leanings — Jack London, who wrote about local oyster pirates from a first-hand viewpoint. He was one.

Back when Benicia was a rowdy town, London was a frequent visitor, tying his pirate sloop, the Razzle Dazzle, at the foot of First Street.

As an oyster pirate, he’d smuggle the mollusks from the beds established by railroad entrepreneurs and sell them in Oakland to a public that appreciated acts detrimental to the railroad’s monopoly — and the cheaper prices for the stolen goods.

When London crashed his boat, he joined the California Fish Patrol that sought out and arrested oyster pirates. Later, he’d describe his adventures in “John Barleycorn,” “The Cruise of the Dazzler” and “Tales of the Fish Patrol.” London himself became a character in “Emma and the Oyster Pirate,” by Benicia author Donnell Rubay.

Pizza Pirate, 72 Solano Square, is decorated with banners in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, said Pat Abshire, the restaurant’s owner.

It’s a place where such buccaneer lingo as “Surrender the booty” and “Pillage and plunder” are heard every day, he said. And those who come in Thursday slinging piratical phrases will get a free small pizza if they buy a large one, he said.

Other businesses also are getting into the spirit. At the pirate supply store 826 Valencia, the retail part of a nonprofit that provides programs in writing for students 6 to 18, every day is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

But the San Francisco store’s operators are trying to finish the renovation of the “fish theater” — an aquarium — in time for Thursday’s celebration.

Oddyssea, an adventure store in Half Moon Bay, will be decorated in Jolly Rogers, and will house its pirate section in a rowboat.

“Talk Like a Pirate Day has inspired other businesses to get started, such as “Dress Like a Pirate,” with the website Dresslikeapirate.com. It’s a Portland, Ore., company operated by Captain Shayna Vest, whose favorite saying, “An 18th century brain in a 21st century head,” actually comes from singer Adam Ant.

She didn’t join in the piratical fun personally until 2006, but now accompanies her boyfriend to such events as the Northern California Pirate Festival in Vallejo, because he’s “a pretty hardcore pirate re-enactor.”

They stay in Benicia during the June festival, and in 2012 celebrated a birthday at Pizza Pirate.

Originally a “Renaissance Faire Washing Well Wench,” Vest started her vintage clothing business online. When she lost her web development job, she boosted her clothing company into a full-time job.

“I made my first buy of pirate shirts, and they sold out in three weeks,” she said. When she was shipping the last 75 shirts for Halloween, “the guy behind the counter said, ‘Did you know there’s a Talk Like a Pirate Day?’” she said.

She contacted the founders and told them that “from now on, I’d be ‘Dress Like A Pirate’ in honor of them, and we’re still friends to this day.”