Tradition, local customs and even superstitions affect the choice of a vessel's name.
Photo by Joel Williams
By Captain Ray
Published: June, 2016
Tradition, local customs and even superstitions affect the choice of a vessel’s name. There are certainly obvious choices—every harbor has a Sun Seeker, a Dawn Treader (from The Chronicles of Narnia), a Happy Hooker and a Reel Affair. Another common ploy is The Office, which allows you to deceive without actually lying: “Sorry, but I’m stuck at the office.” Then there are those slightly risqué names like Seaduction, Nauti Gal, Miss Inclined and Miss Behaving.
Blue water vessels are often named after one of the navigational stars. I’ve seen several boats named Vega, Sirius, Regulus and so on. And of course, it seems like a law (at least in California) that every harbor must have at least one boat with a Hawai’ian name. As you can imagine, a really good boat name can be hard to come by. Then again, sometimes it’s just given to you.
My entry into this treacherous, anxiety-ridden world of naming a vessel began when I was living in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I’d heard that an acquaintance of mine was moving back to the mainland. He didn’t know what he was going to do with his Hobie 16, a small catamaran. His “boat” was in a state of serious disrepair, more a collection of parts than an actual, useable vessel. I suggested to him that I would be willing to take it off his hands, if the price was right. We never reached an agreement on the appropriate price, but he eventually left the island and abandoned it. His ex-landlord was happy to have the wreck gone from the yard and so I became a boat owner (of an unnamed boat) as soon as I removed the pile of parts from his yard to mine.
I was determined to change the wreck into an actual, sailable, complete boat. In typical Hawai’ian local style, I began asking around and let the word spread that I was looking for Hobie 16 parts. Over time, I’d get calls saying, for example, “A friend of mine has a hull in Puako.” (I could only hope it was a starboard hull, because that’s what I needed.) Or someone would say, “I’ve got a rudderhead assembly I don’t need. You can have it.” Little by little, I collected the pieces I needed and managed to repair or refurbish them. I bought a used suit of sails, and for about $150 (and a lot of labor) I finally had a complete Hobie 16 assembled in my yard.
As I was standing admiring my work, Joe, my very Hawai’ian neighbor, came over and in his heavy pidgin said, “E, Ray, your boat is looking good, brah! You got one name for your boat?”
“No, I don’t, Joe.” I replied.
“Well,” he said with some authority, “You should call’um Wilikoi.”
“Hey Joe, dis name is sounding good, brah. But your Hawai’ian mo betta den mine. What dis mean wilikoi?”
He laughed and then began to explain, “It one old kine Hawai’ian word—you no hear um so much anymore; but is one pono loa (perfect) name for your boat. You make your boat outa all kine uddah people’s broken boat, no?”
“I sure did; you saw me working on it for months.”
“Yeah, you work one long time and you do one really maika’i (great or very good) job as you fixum up, brah! Dat’s why dis name so good for your sailboat. Wilikoi—it mean ‘windblown trash.’”
And so, Wilikoi it was!
Regardless of lifestyles, families or careers, choosing a boat name can be difficult. To help boaters with this task, Boat Owners Association of the United States (BoatUS) offers a list of over 9,000 boat names given by boaters across the country over the last 20 years, and last month officially released its 2016 list of Top Ten Boat Names:
1. Happy Ours
2. Freedom
3. Grace
4. Serendipity
5. Island Time
6. No Regrets
7. Liberty
8. At Last
9. Blue Moon
10. Aqua holic
“Happy Ours may be the most popular boat on a Friday night at the marina,” said BoatUS Boat Graphics Manager Greg Edge. “Names like Freedom and Liberty show boaters’ patriotic side, but they also like their boat names to remind themselves to slow down and relax, such as the ever-popular Island Time.” For a look at all of the boat names, go to BoatUS.com/boatnames.
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.
