A boat by any other name?

A boat by any other name would sail as well. Or would it? Most sailors would probably strenuously object to the statement! We think the names of our boats say everything about them and about us.

My previous boat was named the "Shadow Line", after a novel by Joseph Conrad about a young captain's first command. (The boat's old blog is now defunct, but I'll try to take the blog entry about choosing her name off my backups and repost it on the second Shadow Line blog.)

I've raced on Joie de Vivre, Bullet, Escapade, Phantom, Fatuity, Prevail, Near Miss, Summer Wind... I sailed on Nevermind down from San Francisco. Don't try to tell me the owners didn't think those names were important! Other favorites of mine: S/V Nomadness and S/V Pestilence. And lest we forget my other loves, space and SciFi, think of the names of space ships, especially in imaginary universes, like the Culture from Iain Banks novels (among which the "Very Little Gravitas Indeed" probably takes the cake for me).

And so we get to Koan, with or without the little line above of the o. When we bought her (you know that boats are always female, right?) her name was Cosimo, after Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees". I suspect the former owner had an affinity for that character, but neither Dan nor I especially liked what we read about him. I later found out that an even earlier name of our boat had been "First Light", which I love, but this came after our decision to rename her.

Had I bought the boat by myself, the name would have been "Anemone" which is a play on the Greek words for wind (anemos) and alone (moni), but since Dan and I bought her together, I argued that we should name her jointly. We threw around a lot of ideas and "Koan" stuck. We conducted John Vigor's interdenomination boat re-naming ceremony and the deed was done! When we tell people the name we get one of two questions, either "how do you spell that?" or "what does that mean?" As to the spelling, all the traditional caveats of transliterating the sound of a word representing a religious principle that crosses cultures apply. Some might spell it Goan, some think the little line is more important, and in America you'll often hear it pronounced "cone", which is quite far removed from the long o and separate a that I think is technically right. For a definition I can refer you here, but here's my short take on it: A koan is similar to a parable, in other words a story told by an elder to his or her disciples to help them figure out the truth of things. Specifically, koans were told by Zen elders to Zen disciples. They are not, as Christian parables often are, based on analogy, but rather are meant to help the disciples hone their intuition. Dan and I thought that was a very apt name for a sailboat, since we feel that, while sailing can certainly be done by the numbers, there is always a part that is lacking unless you apply your intuition. Also, sailors, being a bunch that loves life deeply, love to tell stories, and we often think our stories are deeper than they sound, which is very true of koans.