h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I live in a coastal area - Houston/Galveston, Texas, USA - with a lot of pleasure boats. A cruise through one of the large marinas can be quite an adventure, including discovery of some clever boat names. One of my favorites is the cruising sailboat "Three-Quarter Time", an allusion to Jimmy Buffet's song "Living and Dying in Three-Quarter Time". Another racing sailboat is named "Kodachrome", probably after the Paul Simon song, and with a paint scheme to match - same colors as a box of Kodachrome film. But my alltime favorite is a sailboat named "Never Again VI".

I live in Perth (Australia) and theres a few here - I remember `The Other Woman` for one. Will check out next time I'm out.

My wife just got back from a three week tour of Australia, she had a great time, but never got west of Uluru (sp? - the big rock). We both think of Perth in a sailing context, having been at Newport when the Aussies won the America's Cup for the first time, leading to the competition being in Perth. It got kind of weird after that, with strange boats like catamarans, aircraft carriers (at least that size ), etc. I guess the Enzedders took over at some point with the Black boat?

Another good racing sailboat name I recall was on both sides of a J24, a high performance 24 footer: "The Opera Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings". Ran from bow to stern.

I once sold a high performance 16' dinghy racer to a friend who promptly named it "SOB" - "Steve's Old Boat".

If I remember rightly, there was a boat entered in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race called "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" - owned by a psychiatrist and a blind man!

Now that's an inspired name! That's also a phrase I read about once in a story about computer translation. The phrase was trnaslated into French, then back into English. It came out "Blind Lunatic".

I once saw a leisure cruiser on the Isle of Wight named "Alice May". Tied to the stern was a small dinghy, "Alice Did"