Best of the Boat Names

We have a new boat. It's been bought largely by donation and we'll have a blog post in the future about how AMAZINGLY AWESOME all our donors are and yada yada yada.

But in the meantime, it kicked off a bit of a discussion on the naming of boats.

The new vessel is an ex-WAIS heavyweight men's pair. Thus, the banter started with the appropriately masculine suggestion of "Speedophile".

Drawbacks include: there is already a Speedophile out there somewhere in the world (in Aberdeen, I'm told), and then someone sent this around, and that rapidly bought the discussion to an end:

One of the more amusing suggestions sent around when I was looking to name my own boat was the simple phrase "Meh." Whether winning, losing, training of whatever... meh.

Given the colour code of WARC being cardinal (crimson, or fire-engine red, depending on what mood we're in), there was the suggestion of "Quantum Tunnelling" from the Flash, which is possibly a little obscure and does reveal just now geeky the WARC family is. It would, however, give us legitimate reason to render our oars as illustrated. And that would be awesome.

The last time I laughed out loud at a boat name, it was "Don't Panic," printed upside-down. I think this would be most appropriate for a novice scull.

For the boats WARC does have that have been named outside the normal parameters of the boat naming committee, we already have some pretty good monikers.

Slippery When Wet, comes complete with the traffic icon.

The Usual Suspects, which was purchased with donations from... the Usual Suspects

Then there's the Three Sisters. This boat was named after the athletes of the family who donated it. Phil, Sarah and Bridget rowed for a collective five or so years at WARC, although all three girls were rarely seen together in a boat. All have gone to far flung corners of the world now, and we miss them... lots.

This pic is of Phil and Bridge at the 2010 Nationals in rAdelaide.

The Moose was originally supposed to be named the Andrew Taylor. That is, until Andrew took over and made bucketloads of "The Moose" stickers and put them everywhere. On the subject of Andrew, his single scull Hoot Owl takes its' name from a throwaway line in an unidentified American sitcom. Andrew proceeded to spend a week walking around the shed yelling "lady you a Hoot Owl!" until he was satisfied the name was ridiculous enough.

Then we have Nomatés, named for the mythical Greek God of single sculling. It's a fairly apt name for a boat class for those who don't play well with others.

And there is a small but vocal group who want to name any new boat Ghostrider.

Here's a few other WARC boat names:

Maali: Means "Black Swan" in Ngoongar and we did seek permission before we named her that. Being a women's eight, we also considered "Maali Mia" which is "Black Swan women" and also Octopussy. Because eight chicks in a boat.

Alan Salisbury: The Big Al and the Little Al are named after this guy who if you don't know who he is, you're probably reading the wrong blog.

Bill Irvine: At 83, Bill is known for saying to a room full of people: "Rowing: That's what turns me on."

And then there's the name of our speedboats, which we can't explain but it is what it is.