Naming the Boat

by Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            It's a common thing among people who own boats, work boats or pleasure boats, to name them after their wives, girl friends, daughters, or even some combination of both their names. Since our boat is named for my wife, I am one of hundreds, probably thousands whose wives’ names are painted somewhere on the boat. But there is some history behind my selection of a name.

            Let's start way back with my very first boat. My former wife and I were attending a play at the Seattle Center, "The Sea Gull" by Chekhov which is an acclaimed play, but which Barbara and I found to be slow, talky, and tiresome. We walked out at the end of the second act, and I remarked to her that the annual Boat Show was on at the Arena (the last year before moving to the Kingdome). We could walk over and see the boats, especially one I had seen advertised as being very inexpensive and brand new from the Reinell plant at Marysville. Skipping over the details, we wound up coming back the next night to put down an initial payment.

            This was not a very well designed sailboat, but I learned to make it go where I wanted it to go under sail, at least most of the time. This boat was named Echappee, which means "Escape" in French. It is also a term for a specific move in ballet and a specific kind of melodic figure in music. A good name for a music teacher's boat. I think this boat was a good one for me because if I could sail it, I could sail anything. Reinell quit producing it rather soon.

            Echappee II followed some time after Barbara and I separated, and then divorced. I was looking for a boat that would sail better than the Reinell (nearly all of them did) and would be suitable for me to live aboard as a kind of hermit, as I had sworn I was never going to look at another woman. I looked first at the Newport 30 Mark II. It was beautiful, and "spoke to me" as they say. The dealer did not have one on hand to sell, but I could order it and it would be ready by the time boating season started. The other advantage was that I could order a dark blue color for the hull and could have a water heater and a space heater installed for comfortable living.

            Yes, I did look at some other boats, some new, some older boats, but none appealed to me as did the Newport, and the Newport man was willing to take the Reinell in trade. The name Echappee still appealed to me, so the new boat would be named Echappee II. So I took the old Reinell down to Seattle one Saturday afternoon in the fall and settled down to wait for the Newport to be delivered several months later from southern California. I was living alone in a trailer on Camano Island and was feeling lonesome and blue, in part because my wife was not going to come back and in part because I didn't have a boat and I was living less than a block from water. A brilliant idea hit me: I would buy a dinghy and go rowing out in Saratoga Passage. A poor substitute for sailing, but it would have to do for all winter and part of the spring.

  

Thanks to www.sailboatlistings.com

            I bought the dinghy in Mount Vernon on the morning of December 31. The salesman said he would deliver it to Camano Island that very day. In the meantime one of my men students, his sister and a couple of her friends planned to come over in the early evening to take me out to dinner for a New Year's treat. They came a bit early and I was not changed into my going-to-dinner clothes. I went into the little trailer's bedroom to change, and while I was there, the man came with the dinghy, a nice double-hulled extremely stable Livingstone boat, 7 feet. Kent, the male student had gone off with his car to get a forgotten camera, and so that left me in the trailer with three attractive young college women. What must that man have thought as he saw me coming out of the bedroom, buckling my belt, looking a bit unfinished! How does this guy handle all these women at the same time?

            As it happened, in the next couple of days, when my telephone was finally installed, I became aware of a young lady who had been singing in my church choir for a time. She was the one who chirped right up with her telephone number when I was complaining about not knowing anyone in the 387 calling area. "You know me!" she said, brightly.

            My resolve to never look at another woman seriously broke down about as fast as the walls of Jericho in the Bible story, and I began to wonder if there really was a married life after my previous married life. When it came to naming the dinghy, I puzzled over it and decided that it was premature to name it "Margaret", because I was not sure of my feelings toward her, or hers toward me. It would be dangerous to name it for an ex-girlfriend. But I wanted to honor Margaret in some way, and although I was unwilling to commit to the full name at that time, I thought with my German roots, I could call it Gretchen, or Gretel like the famous Australian racing boat, or maybe Greta. Yes, that was it. I liked the name Greta, and although I would know it was named for Margaret, probably no one else would know.

            So I rowed it around every now and then in the mornings and late afternoons, and enjoyed it. I may even have given Margaret a row or two in it, I don't remember. In May my new Newport 30 was delivered, and I was satisfied with the Echappee name for it. This was a wonderful boat, and I loved it for the next 16 years.

            During the winter, I kept Greta, the dinghy, on the beach at Utsalady Bay, as it was nice to have it on hand instead of having to go down to the Everett Marina where Echappee was docked. During one of the first couple of winters, somebody came with a pickup truck, I suppose, and stole it. There was a rumor that it had been sighted under a dock at Ketchikan, but I was not about to go up there and look for it. So I had to get a new dinghy, just like the old one. This became Greta II.

By this time, Margaret and I were married.

            We used this dinghy for a number of years, and then one day it disappeared. I thought it had been stolen. This time I replaced it with a truly classy little tipsy dinghy with beautiful wood trim and wonderful rowing characteristics. The Livingstone boats are extremely stable, but they are hard to row. This little boat was not stable, but was a dream to row. Greta III.

            One day while I was walking on the beach one of our neighbors on the island asked if I could load up a beat-up old Livingstone boat on my truck and carry it to the dump. It had washed up in front of her beach house, and it looked as if someone had deliberately tried to sink it. So I hauled it up on shore, took a long look at it, and decided that I could probably repair it so it wouldn't be too much of an eyesore, and it would carry a lot of stuff. It was a 9-footer. This one became Greta IV, but it was finally sold for $50.

            Greta III was lost through my own carelessness in tying a knot in the towing line. We lost it on a rather stormy day sailing between Victoria's Oak Bay and Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. The line did not part, but the knot came loose. Somebody in the Canadian Gulf Islands probably wound up with a very pretty little Greta III.

            But all was not lost. Somewhere in there, I forget just when, Greta II was located back on Camano Island, not so far from where I thought it had been stolen. Now I believe that it simply floated off, but I am still rather upset with the fellow who took possession of it for not attempting to track me down. My name was painted inside the hull. Anyhow, I got it back, and much later it got sold to a fellow in LaConner who said he could restore it.

            So all this dinghy gain and loss took up the space of the 16 years we owned the Newport. After thinking about it for maybe twelve years and several false starts, Margaret and I decided to get a new, bigger boat, and we would live aboard. Daughter Holly was off to Philadelphia in college, and our young son John did not object, so we sold our house and started to buy the boat.

            I recently read an article that claimed the boat chooses you and you don't have a chance to resist once the boat has made up its mind. The boat in this instance was an Ericson 34. It was a year old but had never been privately owned. Of course Margaret and I looked at a number of new and used boats after seeing this Ericson, and we had been devastated when we heard that the company had gone out of business and there would be no more E 34s. What joy when we heard that Pacific Seacraft would resume production on the 34, and I believe the boat we bought is Hull#2 from Pacific Seacraft. This is the boat of our dreams; after 12 years I still drool over it.

            No doubt after all these years of marriage to Margaret and the raising of two children together, I could have come right out and named the boat Margaret, as any right-thinking boater would do. But I had become fond of Greta as a name, and so that is the story of Greta I, Greta II, Greta III, and Greta IV, but now we are calling our Ericson just Greta, not Greta V. It seems appropriate.

Our present dinghy has never been blessed with a name.