by Barbara Levine, April 2023
⛵️ 🛥 Prologue 🚤 ⚓️
Those of you who follow my missives know that I am fascinated with outdoor artwork including murals, mosaics and statues. Another subject that has long intrigued me is boat names.
This missive covers two topics:
⛵️ The first boat that I owned which was never named, and
🛥 Boats and their names on our waterways at the Motorcoach Country Club in the Southern California desert in Indio.
⛵️ A Boat With No Name ⚓️
In a previous missive titled ⛵️ My Own Sailboat, 1973-78 ⚓️ (www.barbaras-missives-wix.net/post/my-own-sailboat), I told you about the first boat that I owned. She was a 26’ SeaQuest sloop* that I purchased with three guys in 1973.
* A sloop is a sailboat with a single mast.
This was during my single years between the end of my first marriage and when I started dating my husband Stan in late 1975.
Top left: My son Mike, age 9, at the helm with me in May 1973. Mike loved sailing it as much as I did.
Top right: My boat under sail off Redondo Beach in 1973.
Bottom left: Myself at the helm with a friend and Captain Horny (his last name was Horn) in 1974.
Bottom right: Captain Horny in the stern with my son Mike, age 10, at the helm in 1974.
My boat partners and I owned her for five years, and we moored her at King Harbor in Redondo Beach. During that time, two of my partners sold their shares to two other guys – thus I had a total of five male boat partners while she was ours.
Our sailboat was used when we bought her, and didn't have a name. My various boat partners and I came up with several candidate names for her, including my favorite two:
Seamen ’n the Lady
Between the Sheets – In sailing terminology, a sheet is a line (rope, cable or chain) used to control the movable corner(s) (clews) of a sail.
We could never agree on a name, so the boat remained without one during the five years that we enjoyed her. Can you imagine needing assistance at sea and radioing Mayday! Mayday! This is Seamen ’n the Lady!?
My Boat With No Name was the only boat that I owned even a share of for the next 28 years – until then, my boating experiences were on boats owned by other people. Some of these experiences are described in another of the missives on my web page titled ⛵️ Crossing the Pacific, 1973 ⛵️ (www.barbaras-missives-wix.net/post/crossing-the-pacific).
🚤 Boat Names at Our Desert Retreat 🛥
In 2005, my husband Stan and I purchased a lot at the Motorcoach Country Club (MCC) in the desert in Indio, CA – 30 miles east of Palm Springs and 130 miles east of our home in Rolling Hills in the Los Angeles area. This was shortly after we had acquired our third motorhome, a 36’ Country Coach.
MCC has 400 RV lots, and we would never have bought one unless we got a lot with our own dock on MCC’s two miles of navigable canals and two small lakes. There is also a nine-hole golf course that winds through the center of the resort.
MCC only allows electric-powered boats with a maximum length of 18 feet. Our resort has two basic electric boat styes – single-hull and double-hull – and there are roughly the same number of each type.
⚓️ Our Boat's Name
In 2006, Stan and I found a used, single-hulled, electric boat – an 18’ Duffy – in Newport Beach, CA, and had it delivered to our lot. We prefer the look of a single-hulled boat over the larger double-hulled pontoon boats, even though the latter are easier to board and more roomy and stable to move around on.
Above, our 18’ Duffy electric boat is at our dock in front of our lot at the Motorcoach Country Club. Our shade structure* is on the left with our casita** behind it, and our motorcoach is on the right in the rear.
* A shade structure has one solid wall, and the other three walls have large shades that lower from above. Ours has a full kitchen, a dining/chess table that Stan made, and a living area with a gas fireplace and a large-screen TV and entertainment center.
** A casita is a small house or other building. Ours is has one small room with a sofa bed for guests plus a washer and dryer, as well as a bathroom.
Our Duffy already had the name Happy Days, and we decided to adopt it as our own. She also displays her original location as Promontory Bay, which is a waterfront community located in the Lower Newport Bay/Balboa Island area of Newport Beach.
⚓️ Other Boat Names at the Motorcoach Country Club
Boat names on our desert waterways, as anywhere else, frequently have nautical derivations. Here at our desert retreat, there are also often references to electrical terminology, as in one of the boats named Watt Fun – these are electric boats, after all. Other frequent themes are sex, alcohol, golf and geography.
As you look at the names of the 49 boats in the collages below, pick out your favorites and compare them to mine at the end of this missive.
⚓️ Favorite Boat Names
In the table below, I have listed the 50 boat names from the photos above in alphabetical order. I have also indicated which are my favorites (Favs), the themes behind their names, and my interpretations as to the origin of their names (if not immediately obvious).
Compare your favorite names to the 12 that I have have selected for myself.
If I had to pick only three favorite boat names, they would be:
Knot-E-Behavior
Fore Play
Sotally Tober
It looks like I am biased toward the sexual and alcoholic names (even though I no longer imbibe).
How do your favorite boat names compare to mine?
🚤 Epilogue 🛥
Whenever we are in the desert, I am once again at the wheel of a boat each time we take it out. I love sailing it and Stan is happy to just relax and enjoy the ride. Our two dogs are always eager to join us, and they sometimes join me at the helm.
I often wear my Captain's cap when I am on the water, either in our boat or in my kayak. The thing that constantly amazes me is that in our 18 years at the Motorcoach Country Club, I have never seen another female here at the helm of a boat!
Now that Stan and I have said goodbye to our whitewater kayaking days, we keep our whitewater boats in the desert so we can paddle on our flat water (see the bottom two photos above). We launch them off our lawn, but the dismount is not as easy.
There is occasionally a harrowing experience if we meet another boat beneath one of the three bridges we must navigate through each way of our four-mile, roundtrip journey. There is barely enough room for two boats to pass each other, even if you stay way to starboard, and especially if the other boat is a large, two-hulled one. The other problem is that our boat does not back up well, and never in the direction I want it to go.
⛵️ Conclusion 🚤
Like Mother, Like Son. My love for sailing and boating has been passed down to my son Mike. He leased a large sailboat with several guys a few years ago.
Mike and his wife Carrie just purchased their own 34' Catalina sloop and sailed it down from Marina del Rey to its new home at King Harbor in Redondo Beach – the same place where The Boat With No Name that I owned with my partners was moored 50 years ago!
Top: The boat named Far Niente before Mike and Carrie purchased her.
Bottom: Mike and Carrie aboard their new boat.
Her name is Far Niente, but they are thinking of adding Il Dolce In front of it – so the whole name in Italian will mean The Sweetness of Doing Nothing.
⚓️ 🛥 The End 🚤 ⛵️
It's good to see that you are still captain of your ship!!