What's in a name?

[Charles Scott]

I typed out a reply at great length and then pressed a wrong button and lost it so if it appears as well as this I apologise. I was interested to see that Julian had named his boat after his mother as I have just done the same thing; having entered my BR 20 for the Sail Caledonia raid I realised that my nameless boat would have to be named, and my wife suggested my mother's names, so the poor thing has had to become Augusta Thomasina. Mother could not abide either name and Augusta was abandoned, and Thomasina morphed through Thomazo to Zazo and ended up as Za. Her father's boat (a rather nice 30 foot bermudan cutter built by Cooper's of Conyer Creek, who more usually built barges) was named Mazilda ie Ma, Za, William (my uncle) and Da. The tender was not named until after my grandparents parted company (what a terrible thing to happen in the thirties) and so became Zawillda !
  I think the worst boat name I have come across was my brother's horrible plywood speedboat in the sixties, which he got very cheap and called Wotabargin. Aaaaargh.

[Peter Cockerton]

I typed out a reply at great length and then pressed a wrong button and lost it so if it appears as well as this I apologise. .

Charles

Construct your posting in another package first e.g. Word, save as you write, use the spell checker as usual, save the document, then copy and paste into the forum, saves a lot of "angst" as I know from a lengthy posting I once lost.

Peter

[Matthew P]

Hi Chris.  Sail Caledonia is a great event and we look forward to meeting you there in Augusta Thomasina.  From your photo on the Sail Caledonia website it looks like you may have a sizeable crew.

I shall be crewing for Andrew in his Craic - a near-perfect name for a Swallow boat?

Matthew
BR20 Gladys

[Charles Scott]

Thank you Matthew, and we are much looking forward to it too. The large crew in the photo will be replaced by a crack (not Craic) crew of 3.

[Rob Johnstone]

Vagabond had nowhere to go when I bought her, so the name seemed appropriate both to that and the wandering for the first few years of her life. Her tender is called Doris, in a rather unkind reference to one of my aunts (now deceased) who had a similar shape and mannerisms. The outboard, being a Mercury, couldn't be called anything other than Freddie and the trailer became Terence, never Terry, as I became aware of its high falutin' ways....And the current car, being from the Czech republic, couldn't be anything other than Martina. So far, nothing else has been named......

[Peter Taylor]

Having sailed  a "Seafly" class dinghy from my youth, when I bought a Lightning 368 single hander I called it "Seabee". This I thought very clever since "Cb" is the meteorological abbreviation for a cumulonimbus cloud - out of which we get lightning. Unfortunately only other meteorologists saw the connection! When I ordered my BC20 from Matt I wondered about "Sea Swallow" but the name had more or less been taken (at least in Welsh). Then I remembered that "sea swallow" is a sailors' name for the tern seabird, hence my BC20 is called "Seatern".

Referring to Michael's post on the 29th Jan, over this last winter there has been a speedboat called "Knicker Twister" tied  to the next jetty upstream from mine. I say "tied" because the owners don't know how to moor a boat and, as I predicted in a warning to them, it sank during the first set of extra high spring tides. Perhaps the name is more than appropriate!

Finally, while monitoring the radios at the Calshot National Coastwatch station we hear many silly, and I would have thought embarrassing, boat names. When naming a boat it's worth remembering that, at some point,  you may have to spell it out phonetically over the VHF to the Coast Guard or whoever you are calling; unfortunately if you give your boat a Welsh name you are likely to have to do that rather often!

Peter

[Ape Ears]

Thank you Peter, for pointing out the significance of the importance of phonetically spelling out an apparently Welsh name, pertinent to my last boat 'Noidr' or N O I D R , I had absolutely 'no idea',
honest!

There was a philanthropic teacher, Dai Jones, at Grimsby many years ago, who kept many reprobates off the streets by supplying a string of boats for us to use. They were named sequentially 'Taffy 1', Taffy 2' etcetera. The final boat he bought was the newly introduced 470 Class , which by rights would have been 'Taffy 8', but was called more appropriately 'Taffle', because it was full of bits of string that got tied in knots. As opposed to being full of Welshmen.

Finally I was always under the mistaken impression that when you saw two seabirds together they were bound to be terns. This is because I was taught when cruising out in the Humber that one good tern always deserves another!

[Graham W]

And all the nice gulls love a sailor.

[jonno]

A nice topic Matthew.

Ella is named after a favourite cat.  The cat was named after Ella Fitzgerald.

The short name appeals (perhaps having to spell it out phonetically); Za (above) excels.

John

[Wave Sweeper]

Aenbharr is the name of a mythical horse, with the power to travel over land or sea,  owned by a god named Lugh in Irish mythology.
I thought I would check this was correct before I posted it and discovered that Lugh also owns a self-sailing boat named Scuabtuinne ("wave sweeper") so perhaps that would have been a better name although it would have caused other people even more spelling and pronunciation problems than Aenbharr.

I once had to make a Mayday call from my then Drascombe Coaster called Storm, and when I hear some of the sillier boat names I wonder how people would feel spelling them out to the Coastguard.

[Rory C]

Whilst cruising in the waters around Skye a few years back there was another vessel we never saw but heard calling Stornoway Coastguard on a couple of occasions. Her name was "Shy Talk"! If the duty operator responded in a hurry we wondered whether there had been a deliberate challenge to her sensibility.
Rory C

[Tim Riley]

Thanks Matthew for another interesting topic and as usual here is a late entry from me. Ristie is the name of a croft on the remote Scottish island of foula. I first learnt of it in a geography book which had a feature on the island and its inhabitants. Years later I went there on an expedition with the Brathay Exporation Group ringing seabirds and discovered that the book I remembered was written by one of their volunteer leaders. We stayed in Ristie and have subsequently stayed there several times. It sheltered me from the storms and its rather basic accommodation is adequate. On that basis I thought it an excellent boat name and as far as I know is the only one such named. It would be great one day to sail into the bay and see both Risties together.

[Graham W]

Tim,

Interesting to see that Foula is still on an adapted Julian calendar when the rest of us changed to Gregorian in 1752.  Their Christmas day is on 6 January!

I see that it's necessary to haul out on to the beach if you want to take a boat there.

[johnguy]

When I was in the merchant navy I was mate for a few months on a bulker called Nosira Madeleine. Try spelling that out to a Korean coastguard on a choppy wet night in January....

She belonged to a man called Ted Arison, who named all his cargo ships after his name backwards plus his wife and daughters. He went on to start Carnival Cruises, now the world's largest cruise group, owning P&O, Cunard etc. No silly names in any of those fleets..

[Peter Taylor]

Well, it amused me!