Picking a Name

One of the questions that I expect is “where did you come up with the name?”

Here’s the story.  In 1995 I bought my first sailboat—a 1989 Hunter 28. I LOVED that boat.  When I found that boat, it already had a name—Artemis.  Cool name – Artemis was the god of war, but it didn’t really mean anything to me.  There are superstitions about renaming a boat, but most people agreed that it was totally ok to rename your boat—as long as you did it when you bought it and not later.

As I was finalizing the purchase, I was asking people for advice for a name for the boat and I got lots of ideas.  One night I was having dinner with my friend Peggy and asked for her advice.  She remembered my obsession with playing the game “Two Truths & a Lie” when I was out sailing.  Problem solved and I had a name.

They say that two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day that they buy their boat and the day that they sell it.  I could not disagree more.  In 2001, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, that she was not going sailing again while we had little kids and that I would be too busy to use it.  While I didn’t sell Two Truths for a 3 more years, my wfe was totally right as I barely used the boat after the kids came.

Now almost 20 years later, I decided to get back into sailing.  I even looked at some Hunter 28s, but they haven’t been made in a while and the ones I saw looked like a lot of work.

Once I found the Catalina, the question was what should I call her?  My first thought was to reuse the old name on a new boat.  I should note that the Catalina that I bought was never named previously.  My daughter thought that was a terrible idea, citing her uncle who wanted to name his dog after his family’s previous dog who had passed away.  My daughter suggested Twenty Questions which was a nice compromise since while it was a new name for a new boat, but it maintained the theme. 

And that is the story.