Well, because the English had a reasonably strong naval tradition that employed a relatively large number of people for a quite some time (maybe /u/jschooltiger can talk about that more specifically?), and people draw their idioms from their daily experiences--George Lakoff has done a lot of work on this kind of thing. If you look through this list of Russian proverbs/idioms you'll find a lot of items involving animals, specifically livestock, birds (crows/ravens, chickens, birds generally), wolves, and bears. You'll also find a decent number of items involving agricultural tools. Why's that? Because Russian speakers were until recently overwhelmingly rural and engaged in agricultural work, and their daily experience involved exactly these kinds of creatures.