Say hello to SV Meriwether

by kerri · Published May 6, 2019 · Updated April 18, 2021

The legend goes that if you change the name of your boat, you risk angering the sea and wind gods, and your boat will take on bad luck if you don’t appease them. There’s a big long name-changing ceremony meant to purge those salty records from the depths that has about as many versions as there are boaters, but all of them involve incantations and throwing booze into the water (and into the mouths of yourself and guests. Because boaters.) I’m not a superstitious person, but I’m on the side of tradition (and “just in case”).

The original intention was to plan this out ahead of time, and invite over some of the few friends and family that are nearby, but nothing goes as planned these days, and we’re always feeling rushed, tired and busy, so when the old name got removed and the new name put on, we decided to just do it quietly the next night.

The variations on the ceremonies are exhaustive, the ceremony itself exhausting (at least in our current state). And I also threw a catch-22 into it… thinking it would be fun to honor the old name, “Bordeaux”, by using Bordeaux wine as our sacrificial alcohol of choice, I bungled a major part of the process, which is to first remove all traces of the old name from the boat.

When I got out the script, it all just suddenly seemed to daunting and not fun at all after another long long day. So we improvised. Blessed the old name, threw the ingot in the water, blessed the new name with our own words, not a script. Said our own little brief casual incantation to Poseidon, and the god of each wind direction, gave them plenty of wine to make up for our brevity, and sat down in the cockpit to finish off the rest and enjoy the sunset.