Names

Ever since we went to see the trimaran which is currently named "Aukai" which I believe is Hawaiian and means "sea farer", we have been discussing what we would call her. Discussing sounds like a nice way to say it when it was more like controlled disagreement. It was like trying to name a child and having experienced this process three times before, I can tell you it wasn't an easy task. Of course over the years one of our favourite passtimes was to wander around the different marinas where ever we happened to be and checkout the boats, window shopping if you will. And every time we'd read all the names and would come away disgusted. People are so unimaginative in their boat names. "Summer Breeze", "wind dancer", "Nauti Cat", "Serenity", "off the hook", "the easy life", "petty cash", "aquaholic" and the word play goes on and on. We cant help but roll our eyes and groan. But now as we are soon to be boat owners we are faced with the task of naming our own boat. Can we avoid the typical desire to be clever that most boats owners seem to be plagued with? Can we find something somewhat unique, but something that also fits us as a family and gives our boat the proper personality? It's much harder than you think. Especially in the cruising world, you and your boat name are one and the same. Of course as is my nature when I have to do something I have never done before, such as naming a boat, I get on google and see whatever info and guidelines I can find in helping with this. And in my searching I stumbled across an article written by Patrick Schulte. Any readers who do not own a sailboat probably will be like, "Patrick Who?" But if you are part of the sailing world, I'm sure you know who I mean. Pat and Ali Shulte write the website . Ten years ago, never having set foot on a sailboat before, they bought a catamaran and circumnavigated the world. Then drove across the country in a classic Porsche, then travelled from Alaska to Argentina in a VW bus. And are now currently living on a fixer-upper sailboat in Mexico with their two young children. The bumfuzzle clan is the go-to resource for all us would-be adventurers.

So back to naming, Pat had detailed in his article his frustrations with typical boat names and in his frank and sarcastic style laid out some good points when it comes to naming your boat. And the one that stuck with me most was try to think about having to spell your boat name over the VHF radio every time you get hailed at sea, every time you come across another boat, or going into ports and you will be asked to spell your boat name, military style. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta... So Pats suggestion was to have a one word boat name and the smaller the better. With this rule in mind we ended up settling on "Bat" if we should get this trimaran. It made sense. It looks like a bat with its triple hulls attached by webbed wings, it echolocates with radar and sonar like a bat and flies across the water instead of through it and is easy to spell, Bravo-Alpha-Tango. But as much as the name suited the boat, it didn't have any personal connection to us, it's sailors. So we kept looking and after weeks of many suggestions and dictionary and thesaurus searches, covering every topic from Star Trek to the Bible we came up with SweetHaven. For those of you who didn't grow up watching the Popeye cartoons, SweetHaven is the village he lives in.

This picture is of the actuall Popeye village SweetHaven that was made for the 1980 Popeye movie starring Robin Williams, it's located in Malta, hopefully someday we'll sail there. Popeye has a connection to Mark and I, Mark being a sailor man I would send him popeye graphic T-shirts when he was away on deployment, it became our thing. And of course many childhood Saturday mornings spent watching the exploits of Popeye, Olive Oyl, Bluto, Whimpy and Swee'Pea, settled the name SweetHaven for our boat comfortably in our minds. Having channeled the popeye spirit we've given our boat a neat personality which suits our family, now comes the task of deciding what colour scheme to decorate the inside, the name we chose of course helps to decide this too.

"I'm strong to the finich, cuz I eats me spinach, I'm Popeye the sailor man."