Master and Commander

I have been reading Master and Commander, which I picked up last week, between working on my certification.
I became aware of it because of the movie and was surprised that I had never read any of O'Brian's novels before since I am a big fan of Horatio Hornblower.

I came across this article today that states that though O'Brian wrote about sailors he was not one himself and in fact had very little knowledge about the actual operation of a sailboat.