What's in a name?

The urge that drove us to put our redundant computing technology out to grass is still with us, driving us in other directions. Cupboards and drawers not opened for months are exposed to the light of day. Bookshelves are examined closely, exposing titles thought lost to us but which in turn make us examine our priorities. Once read, what purpose does a book have? Does it have a right to a space on our bookshelves when it will never be picked up and read? Might we read it again? What about saving it for those who might visit us?

Then, tucked in amongst the hardbacks we spot something else, slimmer volumes, lightly bound things one might have once called 'exercise books'. They are different from the published novels. These are written by us, not as novels but as day to day records of our sailing activities. These are our ship log books, something we decided, for reasons now lost to us, that we should maintain for each of our sailing boat trips, paper records of our own lives that we would never want to lose.

And they go back many years, back to our first voyage in our first sailing boat. However this was certainly not a sea tested vessel waiting for us in a sheltered harbour somewhere. Far from it. She had spent her entire life in the fresh waters of Lake Windermere in the English Lake District. Her name was 'Rondo', a rather dull sounding offering that was never going to suit us with our rapidly growing young family. So how and when did we rename her?

I return once again to the log book collection, amongst which I find a notebook and on opening at the first page I find written in big letters: "JOBS TO DO ON RONDO". The date, which is noted at the top of the page, is 26th October 1985, so long ago that my memory of it is almost gone. It was in this notebook that I used to sketch out my plans for, amongst other things, boat improvements, measurements noted down in feet and inches (not a measurement system I would use now) with helpful comments on how something might work best. There are sketches in pencil or sometimes in ink with dimensions and arrows pointing to particular features from explanatory side notes. It might be a modification to the galley, a whisker pole, coachroof sheet clutches, a folding sink for the heads, a radical self steering mechanism that I designed and built myself, sail measurements, there is even a pre-Holland checklist and then a list of 'Lessons Learnt' from our holiday there in 1988. The variety and the detail is amazing to my present day eyes yet the writing is mine, long forgotten maybe but undeniably mine.

So to return to the name. For how long did we retain the name Rondo and what was the thinking behind any change? To answer this we need go no further than page four of my notebook for here are recorded all the potential names we considered for our cosy little ship. I can do no better than list them all here:

BLODWYN

GOLDEN BIRD

JAMIE FIVE (PIP)

OBSESSION

BLIND PANIC

FURTLE (PIP) FURTAL FURTEL FERTLE FIRTLE

DRAGON

NOGGIN THE NOG

The final name in the list has a ring drawn around it, for the very good reason that this is the name we chose to call our first boat.

So who or what is Noggin the Nog?

This is a fictional character appearing in a BBC Television cartoon series originally broadcast between 1959 and 1982 and in a series of illustrated books which were published from 1965. The creators were Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin who were inspired to create "The Sagas of Noggin the Nog" by the discovery of 12th century Norse chess pieces on the Isle of Lewis which they saw in the British Museum. It is considered a cult classic from the golden age of British children's television, Noggin himself being a simple, kind and unassuming "King of the Northmen" in a roughly Viking Age setting, with various fantastic elements such as dragons, flying machines and talking birds. He is the good-natured son of Knut, King of the Nogs, and his queen Grunhilda and when King Knut dies, Noggin must find a queen to rule beside him or else forfeit the crown to his uncle, Nogbad the Bad. Noggin meets and marries Nooka of the Nooks (an Inuit princess), and becomes the new king.

Whilst pre-dating the lives of our children by many years, the name would have meant a lot to our young boys as they had grown up with us reading bedtime tales from one of the books. To us the name just felt right. It was unique, in sailing circles, it was quirky and of course to anyone of a certain age who grew up when the sagas were first broadcast it would bring a smile of recognition and remembrance. It was also easy to recognise clearly when spoken over the VHF radio when we were entering a harbour, an important point, although cutting out the fabric for the letters on our spray dodgers did prove to be quite tiresome.

She was a compact little vessel, brought across from Windermere on the back of a lorry and launched at Blyth in Northumberland, close to where we were living at the time. Although only twenty four feet in length she had enough space inside for us and our three boys to sleep in, was solidly built and with the benefit of a less-than-reliable outboard engine slung off the transom we made numerous voyages along the east coast of the UK and even went across the North Sea to Holland, as described in the notebook.

On some of these voyages she was accompanied by a substantial fibreglass dinghy which had come with the boat when we bought her. This was towed behind us, even on our passage to Holland, and was later converted into a sailing dinghy by adding a windsurfer mast and sail. She had her own name, of course. She was called 'Darth Wader', again a name that would have meant something to us all.