Naming the Boat

As you can probably guess from the name of the blog our boat’s name is Kailani.  However, when we bought our new boat it was named Ahwahnee.  Now, for those of you who have been to Yellowstone Park, the name might mean something.  The Ahwahnee Hotel is a beautiful hotel in Yellowstone that looks like a cross between a log cabin and a castle.  We’ve never been there, so the name meant nothing to us.  In addition, Ahwahnee literally translates to “Place of a Gaping Mouth”.  I assume that has something to do with the views from the hotel, but we didn’t want that as the name of our new home.

Over the weeks while we waited for the survey we tried out names to see how they would fit.  Knot Working, Sol Mates, Never Monday, Blown Away and Gone With the Wind were a few of the ones we tried out.  Boat names should be easy to pronounce, easy to spell and easy to remember.  In case of an emergency you want people to understand your boat name and often when sailing you become your boat name – that couple from Ahwahnee.

We went through lists of names.  Wendy would read them off and we would instantly say “no” or “maybe”.  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hmmm, maybe, no, no, no, no, etc.  Then we took our “maybe” list and narrowed it down to a few choices.  From there we picked one – Kailani.

Kailani is Hawaiian for Sea and Sky.  Kai = Sea and Lani = Sky.  I went to high school in Hawaii and Wendy and I have vacationed there together.  We liked the sound of it, we liked the ease of spelling and we liked the meaning.  Done.

So, the new name is Kailani and our hailing port or home port is Austin, TX.  The home port was another discussion, but I’ll skip that one.

The new stickers have arrived and this weekend we should have the time to remove the old name and adhere the new name.  I'm sure everyone has heard that it is bad luck to change the name of a boat, but just owning a boat comes with plenty of bad luck as you'll see in future posts.  I'm not sure how to tell that apart from the bad luck of a name change or maybe so far all of our bad luck has been because Poseidon knew we were planning on changing the name.  Anyway, after changing the name we'll have a drink in the cockpit, we'll share some with Poseidon as insurance and hopefully things will stop breaking on Kailani.