Clearly, the name has to go.

It would seem inappropriate and odd to leave the boat we’re buying named after the current owner’s mother-in-law, particularly given that said owner chose the handle because he “wanted to put her name on the ass end of something.” He said it in jest, I’m sure—we met his wife and I got the distinct impression she brooks no guff. But still. Leaving the boat with its current name would mean carrying on a family joke we weren’t privy to in the first place.

So Iola Anne will no longer be Iola Anne after we buy it. We need to settle on a new name before we register the boat with the Coast Guard, since registering it under the current name and rechristening it later will cost something like $450 (What’s that? Did someone say bureaucracy?)

We’d hoped that the perfect name would magically rise to the surface, that we’d hit on it and think, “Yes, this is it! It suits her perfectly!” It seems that our wondrous new floating home and newsroom should inspire no less, but so far, the naming muse has been frustratingly elusive.

We brainstormed on the six-hour drive from San Carlos to Arizona after surveying the boat but came up empty-handed. We considered marine names like Sea Star and Seahorse, but ruled them out as unimaginative and probably well-used already.

We talked about celestial names but came up with nothing we liked except maybe Blue Star, blue signifying the water and star the guiding light, but it seemed a little vague. What’s a blue star? Does it sound slightly porn-like? We ultimately figured if we got tripped up on the meaning, it doesn’t work. We like Bella Star, but there’s already a boat in Puget Sound, a beautiful Hans Christian, with that name.

North Star was also discussed, but my association with North Star is a brand of sneakers that was de rigeur for hipster Canadian kids during the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were cool sneakers and I hope they make a comeback, but I don’t necessarily want a boat name reminiscent of my days at Lord Kelvin Elementary.

We considered foreign terms. We were married and honeymooned in Croatia, so we thought about possible Croatian names. Apparently we’d forgotten how completely alien and unintuitive that language is. It’s virtually impossible to even guess the meaning of a Croatian word from hearing or reading it. “Beautiful,” for example, is “lijepo.” The Croatian word for boat is “brod” and sailboat is “jedrilica.” I’m not even sure how to pronounce those correctly and can imagine having to constantly repeat and spell the name for people. Forget it.

We could name the boat Lily Winston Churchill, but naming it after our cat, regardless of how perfect and adorable she is (and she is; did you know that she’s toilet trained?), seems too precious by half. We’ve already turned into those people we used to make fun of, who talk about the cat like it’s a child (“You won’t believe what Lily did today”….). No need to go any further down that road.

I can’t stand puns, so anything like Fantasea or Ahoy Vey is out of the question, as are sophomoric monikers like Breaking Wind, Master Baiter and Wet Dream.

The name needs to be meaningful to both of us, not too serious and ideally, a little cheeky. I’m starting to think it would be easier to name a child. At least then you know you’d be working within the boundaries of people names. A boat name might be a phrase, an idiom, a person’s name, a foreign word, a geographical name … the possibilities are endless. Since virtually anything could work, nothing seems particularly fitting.

All of this agonizing over names got me wondering about the most popular boat names. I looked online and found the annual list compiled by BoatU.S., the Boat Owners Association of the United States, which lists the following Ten Most Popular Boat Names for 2008:

1. Seas the Day
2. Summer Daze
3. Second Chance
4. Aqua-Holic
5. Wind Seeker
6. Dream Weaver
7. Black Pearl
8. Hydrotherapy
9. The Salt Shaker
10. Sea Quest

Hydrotherapy and Aqua-Holic aren’t terrible, but the rest? Seas the Day and Summer Daze are groan-inducing. Second Chance, Wind Seeker and Sea Quest—prosaic and hackneyed.

Black Pearl showed up on the Boat U.S.  Top 10 list in 2007, four years after the release of the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Since much of the appeal of a life aboard for us involves escaping the trappings of a consumerist culture, naming a boat after a Disney blockbuster seems exceedingly lame. It’s the antithesis of what we’d want a boat name to say.

The Salt Shaker just seems silly, and since I’m a child of the ‘70s, Dream Weaver will always remind me of rollerskating to the Gary Wright song (and that hilarious scene from Wayne’s World).

The boat name might be taking on an oversized significance in part because of how much we disliked our previous boat’s name. Camelot was corny, saccharine and about as original as The Other Woman. We talked about changing it but figured if we were going to sell it in the near future, we might as well not bother. 

After racking our brains to distraction about Iola Anne‘s new name, we’ve come to the conclusion that the best name for our new boat might just be the most obvious one: Three Sheets Northwest, or just Three Sheets. We like the name for its nod to tradition and its double entendre (admittedly, three sheets to the wind is a condition not unfamiliar to either of us). It’s the name of our first business together and we hope, the path to living and working aboard together in the foreseeable future. We could do worse by a name.

I’m not giving up hope that the most perfect name possible name might strike like a bolt of lightning when we’re least expecting it. It might pop into one of our heads while we’re in the shower, out for a run, lost in a book or most likely, about to fall asleep. Clearly, overthinking it isn’t bringing the desired results.

So for now, Three Sheets it is. If any of you naming wizards out there have any inspired ideas, feel free to drop us a line. Beers on us if your name ends up on our boat’s ass end.