Naming a sailboat

Photo courtesy Bob MugglestonThere are too many boats named Zephyr out there.

May 2022

By Nico Walsh

It’s a lot easier to name powerboats than sailboats. A powerboat can have some cutesy name, or a dreadful pun, and get away with it. At Menemsha’s Dutcher Docks I saw a big motor yacht called Nauti Bunni and the name somehow worked. You’ve seen a million others.

Sailboats are different. Just the act of buying a sailboat is the owner’s admission to his or her poetic side, and the sailboat’s name should reflect that fact.

Choosing a sailboat’s name involves powerful and specific considerations, ignored at the owner’s risk. For example, you should never name your yacht after how you earn your living, no matter how subtle you think the allusion. Remember: The yacht is for your poetic side. The yacht has nothing at all to do with how we make the money. Yes, we work so we can buy the boat, so there’s a small fiction here.

Some names are taken, or retired. Think twice before you name your little sloop Shenandoah or Intrepid.

Some names are for big boats, some are for little, and some for small craft. Some names are for crazy fast racers, others are for four-knot, crab-crushers. Ticonderoga suits a powerful 72-foot ketch. Sardine fits a peapod. Carbon Footprint fits a behemoth power yacht.

If you don’t like the name of a boat you have bought, change it. No bad luck will come of that. But if you think you might like the name, keep it for a while and see if it grows on you. Your boat may have made friends in many ports and if you change the name they won’t know the boat.

The perfect name works well on the radio. There’s a charter boat called Dazed and Confused, which could be a problem in an emergency. Names in a foreign language can be pretty but consider whether you want to spell the name every time you speak to a marina or use the name on the radio.

Avoid shopworn names. Our new cutter was Zephyr until we renamed her. The owners obviously thought naming the yacht after the Greek god of the west wind was a beautiful idea, and indeed that was true, for the first dozen Zephyrs. There are now three hundred and ninety Zephyr variations documented with the Coast Guard, a number that doesn’t even include state-registered boats.

Your proposed name doesn’t have to be unique necessarily, just not common. You can Google “Coast Guard vessel name search” to get a read on how often your proposed name is used on documented vessels.

An early contender for our new cutter was Native, a name I thought muscular and also reflective of a certain philosophy, the yacht or perhaps me being a “native” of the world and so on, but I wasn’t 100% sure and then a gang of surly dinner guests claimed it was insensitive. And, anyway, there are already a lot of yachts called Native. So Far and Away won out. No deep philosophy in the name, but I love the double meaning, I like the sound, and I like the retro vibe, the ’50s and ’60s representing, to me, a golden age of yachting. The only challenge is the name is aspirational, and demands that the yacht and I embark on very long cruises; a yacht called Far and Away can’t be a stay-at-home.

Here are some names I’ve come up with over the years and never used. If there’s any appeal, help yourself:

Trice. An old English usage of uncertain etymology that dates to at least the 1500s, meaning at once, or instantly. It could be the name of a fast, traditional cruising boat.

Brant. A brant is a sort of seagoing goose common to New England. Saucy, sounds good on the radio, one fat syllable, a Bronx cheer. Bird names make good boat names – Herreshoff’s Meadowlark and countless others come to mind – but I don’t think I have seen a transom bearing the name Brant.

Shiloh. A terrible Civil War battle in Tennessee, 23,000 dead, the battle being named after a local chapel. In Hebrew, “Shiloh” means a place of peace or place of rest, a lovely sentiment for a sailing yacht. Given the name’s role in our history, it might be right for a traditional American design, say a big catboat. There are a few Shilohs already out there, it’s true, but not many.

Tipping Point. Maybe a good name for someone’s first sailing yacht, about which purchase, and use, the new owner is nervous.

Pierhead Jump. When a sailor signs on for a voyage knowing nothing about the ship, he’s made a pierhead jump. It’s a salty name for a boat bought without a lot of deliberation.

New York Minute. Johnny Carson said it’s the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning and the guy behind you hitting his horn. For a fast racing boat.

Horizon Job. In an ocean race, when you pass a competitor and by the day’s end he disappears behind you, you’ve given him a “horizon job.”

One name I’ve come up with makes me wish I owned a Melges 20: Katabatic. A katabatic wind is a gravity flow. Just as water runs downhill under force of gravity, so does cold, heavy air, sometimes at 100 knots when the dense air pooled on an alpine snowfield suddenly races down a glacier to the sea. (My wife Ellen and I were once anchored in southeast Alaska when it went from dead calm to 35 knots in less than a minute, and the anchor hung up and we had to cut the rode and sail off a close lee shore.) Katabatic was unique just a year or two ago, but now the Coast Guard lists four.

Powerful local winds get local names, such as Williwaw, Bora, Chinook, Sirocco, Mistral, Harmattan, Santa Ana and so on, and local winds are another deep well of good yacht names.

I believe many folks considering a yacht name don’t allow enough time. A friend breeds draft horses. He sometimes waits as long as a year to name a foal, and the names are always great. When I bought Journeyman, our first cruising boat, she was Vagrant, a name which in years gone by had a carefree, wandering connotation. For the new name I turned over various finalists in my mind – MacWhirr, after Joseph Conrad’s steadfast and resolute skipper in the novel “Typhoon” – was one, but none seemed right. Journeyman, which came to me several months after we took delivery, was an instant fit, for me and for the sloop. The new owner proposed to keep it.

Nico Walsh is an admiralty attorney living in Freeport, Maine. A former Coast Guard officer, merchant mariner and commercial fisherman, Nico has been sailing for five decades. He and his wife Ellen cruise extensively on Far and Away, their Cabo Rico 34.