It’s hard to come up with good boat names. I’ve seen many a Dawn Treader and Sun Seeker and several fishing boats with the name Reel Affair and Happy Hooker.
By CaptaIn Ray
Published: August, 2013
It’s hard to come up with good boat names. I’ve seen many a Dawn Treader and Sun Seeker and several fishing boats with the name Reel Affair and Happy Hooker. There are always a few with slightly risqué names like Miss Inclined, Miss Behaving, and Nauti-Gal and occasionally one that goes a bit too far trying to be clever, such as Wet Spot. There are also some that tell us about their owner—like Rude and Annihilator. Then there was that big yellow catamaran from Los Angeles named Bitch. Maybe they bred dogs, but somehow I don’t think so.
Work boats will often use a first name and initial like the Bobbie B, and you can always use the name of your wife, mother, aunt or daughter. But it’s hard to come up with a truly good boat name.
Some years ago while I was living in Kona (on the Big Island of Hawai’i), I was almost finished restoring a Hobie 16 and I struggling with choosing a name. It had all begun when I found parts of a Hobie 16 that someone had dumped in the back of a parking lot when they moved away. The parts had been there for months and the lot owner was happy for me to remove them. So I got a friend to help me load them into my pickup and took them home. I was now the proud owner of about half of a Hobie Cat.
As I began the process of restoration, I also started asking around and actively looking for the other parts that I needed. I was very pleasantly surprised to find how many pieces were scattered about the Big Island. I found a mast in the boatyard at Kawaihae, a rudderhead assembly in a shed in Puako, a jib under a house in Waiohinu and so on. The more I asked, the more the pieces I needed kept appearing. Within about six months, I had everything except sails.
Since this was before the Internet, I began watching the classified ads. Several months later, there it was—an ad selling Hobie 16 sails for a few hundred dollars. That plus the shipping was a lot of money for me at the time, but so far, all I had into this boat was gas money and labor, so I bought the sails.
A short time later, I had a complete Hobie 16 assembled in my yard. As I was admiring it, my very Hawai’ian neighbor Joe came over and said, "Eh, Ray! Your boat is looking good, brah! You got one name for your boat?" "No I don’t, Joe." "Well," he said, "You should call um Wilikoi." "Eh, Joe, Wilikoi is sounding good, you know, but your Hawai’ian mobetta den mine. What dis mean, Wilikoi?"
"You know," he said, "You make your boat out of all kine udda people’s broken boats. I see you workin’ hard to fixum up and you do good job, brah. Wilikoi is one ol’ fashion kine word, you no hearum so much now-a-days, but is perfect for your wa’a (boat). It mean ‘windblown trash.’"
Wilikoi was indeed the perfect name for my boat!
Ray Wichmann, is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Master Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.
