When we bought our boat, we knew her current name was not going to work for us. No matter how long I live in Florida, I don’t see myself identifying with “Dolphin Girl.” This is not to say that I’m not delighted to see pairs of dolphins frolicking in the water as we travel the Florida waterways. But our new boat needed a new name. One that means something to us.
And we were pretty certain we had come up with the PERFECT boat name. One that more closely matched our particular life journey.
But, as we learned from boating friends, and through some quick Google searches, changing the name on a boat is not something you do without a lot of preparation. Unless, of course, you want to get the attention of the Gods of the sea and risk things like fires below deck, collisions with other boats, and sinking!
What’s in a name?
As legend has it, Poseidon himself keeps every vessel’s name in his personal record book – the “Ledger of the Deep”– and will only grant safe passage throughout the seven seas to those who respect his protocols. And failing to rename your vessel appropriately is among the surest ways to experience his wrath.
The ritual for renaming a boat is lengthy, so I won’t go into detail here, but feel free to do a quick search to read the scripts we had to read aloud and follow the tasks we performed in order to safely rename our boat from Dolphin Girl to Coddiwomple. There are a total of six parts to it, including:
The renaming ceremony
- removing every trace of the old name
- purging the old name
- performing a renaming ceremony
- making a sacrifice
- appeasing all four wind gods
- toasting the new name
Today was the day we jumped through all those hoops to satisfy the sea Gods. It was also the first time we dropped anchor on our own. We did an OK job with that (or I should say I did an OK job with my new role.) Like everything I’ve done so far in boating, I learned a lot from the experience. Why you have to screw things up in order to learn is beyond me, but it seems to work.
We dropped anchor–and it held — and I read the script verbatim. Dave dropped the piece of metal with the old name written on it into the river, we offered our libations to the sea Gods in every direction, toasted the new name, and finally unveiled the new name we had applied that was covered with brown paper the night before.
We has such a fun time toasting our new boat, feeling very much like this was the first step in another chapter of our coddiwomple life.
