Next to arguing what to name your baby, I rank naming your boat most stressful.
Talking about a sailboat’s name because those ‘stink-potters’ tend to choose fish-catching, wife-joking, cash-spending titles. One rookie skipper in a sailboat fleet named his sloop Kathy’s Mink, but other skippers frowned and he found something more seaworthy.
The oldest naming tradition warned that anything more, or less, than seven letters would bring bad fortune. That’s why I named my Snipe class sailboat Ya Vamos, a seven-letter Spanish idiom that means ‘coming through.’ Even paid a painter to duplicate the horns insignia on the side of my DeSoto station wagon. Plus a transom picture of a raging bull.
That was the year I managed to foul out of at least one race in every regatta.
“You’re a rabble rouser,” Christine Eastus proclaimed. Yep. Named my next Snipe Rabble-Rouser.
When we bought a 30-footer, my Carolina coast partners wanted to name her after a female pirate Anne Bonny. When we registered the sloop with the Coast Guard, we learned three other crafts bore the same name.
The Carolina pirates we raced against often referred to her as the ‘Bon Amie.’ But I figured the seven-letter rename helped us out-sail them when the wind blew strong. Also Anne Bonny’s Wake made a fine title for my first published novel.
In my third novel, now in draft manuscript, Maggie and Hersh buy a new boat. Need seven letters. How does Mermaid Mayhem sound to you?
Image credit Oriental Dinghy Club
