Here We Go Again!

The other day I came back to the blog and read a few of my old posts. Based on those posts, it seems like I come back here every three years or so and decide to start the blog back up, make a few comments about how I never post and I should post more often, then promptly stop posting. Not this time though! (And I say that a lot too.)

I like writing here because it feels both productive and therapeutic. Sometimes I get stuck on the couch, scrolling through Facebook or playing Animal Crossing on the Switch. There's no way that can be productive.

So how about an update? Well, the last several years here have had posts about my boat and my political opinions.

Regarding the boat, the Pearson 28-2 "Ramble On" that I last posted about has been sold. We kept if for a few years and then sold it to upgrade to a larger boat. The new boat is an Island Packet 32 called "Island Thistle."

In fact, I have a whole YouTube channel  that I started right when I bought that boat. I've finished two "seasons" on the channel and I'm now on a winter hiatus. So even though this blog has dropped off, a vlog has mostly taken its place.

That channel has been doing fairly well. I'm almost up to 200 subscribers and 58,000 lifetime views. Maybe that's not great compared to a lot of channels, but it is growing.

Regarding political rants, I also created a YouTube channel with those! That one is not nearly as popular with only two subscribers. I started trying to put up a lot of content on that channel, but that got frustrating so I stopped. I'm debating whether or not to start that one back up.

So even though I have more than 400 hours on Animal Crossing over the last couple of years, I have still been somewhat productive!

Name Is Official and Not Enough Water

Boat name is on and it doesn't look half bad!  It was pretty easy to install.  I bought it, like my last boat name, from BoatUS.  They have good prices and a good product.

I spent quite a while measuring and checking and double checking and getting my wife's input to make sure the name was perfectly straight.  On my last boat, I put the name on while it was in the water and I was in a kayak.  That made things difficult and my wife swears it was slightly crooked (even though all my measurements said it was not).

With the name on the boat I was ready to put it in the water and scheduled the launch for last week.  I received a phone call on the day of the scheduled launch and learned that the boat could not be launched because there was not enough water at the marina.

It turns out that several days of strong northwest winds earlier in the week had pushed all of the water out of the creek and it was too shallow to launch.

I ended up going the marina the following day anyway to load some things on the boat and run the power for the new chart plotter.  The water level in the creek was indeed quite low, with a few boats tied to docks near the marina leaning on their sides.  We will try again this week.

I also happened to get a picture of another boat name, below, that is very crooked, far more so than my last boat.  It is so crooked, that they had to cut off the top part of the starboard side to get it to fit on the transom.  I will use this boat forever after as my "could be worse" boat name.  (You can also see the low water level in the creek as it looks like "Jackie" is sitting on the bottom.)

What's In a Name?

With the purchase of the new boat came the discussion about what to name her.  The old name was "Pursuit," which I was OK with but the other half of the purchase thought the name too intense and serious, not to mention how much she enjoys playing with the boat lettering tool on the BoatUS Boat Graphics site.

Picking a boat name is tough.  Let's go back to my last boat to see how that name came about.  My daughter is ever the reluctant boater.  For a teenage girl, spending the night on a small boat in tight quarters with her parents is akin to cruel and unusual punishment.

In order to get her to join us with as little guff as possible, we made an agreement to play the Pokemon card game on the boat with her.  After playing the game and learning about various "water-type" Pokemon with cute names, my wife thought it would be fun to name the boat after a water-type Pokemon, and thus Poliwhirl was born.

With the new boat, I did not want to go down the Pokemon route and decided instead to scroll through the countless boat name suggestions on the Internet.  After looking at few thousand names, I started leaning toward boat names that were related to music, the occupation of both my wife and I (education), or ancient Indonesian gods and goddesses.

The short list I started creating ended up like this:

Hall Pass
Job Site
Maybe Later
Forty-Two
Sun Dog
Summer School
School Skipper
School's Out
Recess
Homework
Semara
Ramble On
Rain Song
Black Dog
Tangerine

After much deliberation, we settled on the name "Ramble On," one of my all-time favorite Led Zeppelin songs that I thought fit a boat very well with its notion of travel and adventure.

So there you have it, Ramble On was born.  Alas, as these things go, Ramble On is not a truly unique name.  In fact, soon after deciding on the name, I found a boat of the exact model as ours with the same name, also in the Chesapeake Bay.  I was somewhat dejected by the discovery, but ultimately I really like the name, the song, and the band enough that I'm not going to pick another name.

After picking the name and while peeling the old name off our boat, I saw another boat (pictured above) with the name "The Dave" and a picture of a dog.  This was truly one of the coolest boat names and picture combinations I've seen in a while.  I almost considered copying the idea and using my dog Rutus as the inspiration.  But the graphic was already ordered and as my daughter said, Rutus, a pug, would make for an ugly picture on the transom.

Pictures of the new boat with lettering attached will be forthcoming.  I plan to go down to the boat again in February to put the lettering on before she is launched.