What's In a Name?

What the Hell is a Guillemot anyway? And why name your boat after something that no one has ever heard of much less can pronounce?

To begin, it is considered bad luck to rename a boat. There are involved ceremonies, involving large amounts of alcohol (and perhaps a few virgins) to evade the bad luck (See: http://boatsafe.com/nauticalknowhow/rename.htm for a complete description). We thought that if the boat had always been called Edimir, we would have to keep the name. We discovered that she has been renamed by every owner, so we decided that the bad luck had already been used up. First she was Duchess, then Santa Paula, then Edimir. Edimir was the last owner's grandmother. , We decided we could continue the tradition and change the name.

Our last boat was the Lutra - Latin for the Genus of the river otter. We had thought about bird names then, but decided that Anas (duck) would surely be misunderstood, Haliaeetus (Bald Eagle) sounded like a disease, and Pandion (Osprey) didn't quite make it either. Boat names should have some snap and be easily understood over the radio!

While we were at the boat show on July 4, we saw a number of boats on which the dinghy had a name related to the boat - for example there was the Winifred, whose dinghy was "Lil Fred". We started thinking birds again, since we planned to use the boat in the winter to look at migrating waterfowl. We considered Scoter, since Surf Scoters are one of the common winter sea ducks, but Nancy vetoed that since she said it sounded too much like scrotum. For a while we considered Auk (the dinghy could be the Auklet) except that the Auk is extinct and that seemed like a bad omen! We seemed to be hovering around various seabirds that occur in the Pacific Northwest. Next was Murre since there is also a bird called a Murrelet (which would work for the dinghy). But Murre didn't strike the right tone for using on the radio.

And then we thought of Guillemot. The pigeon guillemot is a common seabird in the Puget Sound in the winter. It is an attractive black bird with bright white wing patches (in the winter) with garish red feet and mouth.

Called a pigeon guillemot because they resemble pigeons as they bob in the waves, the name probably comes from the French Guilliame, (meaning Little William) because of the call made by juvenile guillemots. To make things more confusing, in Europe, the birds that we call guillemots are known as Murres.

We didn't have a good name for the dinghy yet, but Guillemot sounded better each time we said it.

So when we went to register the boat, we officially changed her name - the Edimir is now officially the Guillemot. And we can spend the next few years explaining that it is the small black seabird, and not a native American chief or some kind of fishing gear