Up in Bar Harbor, Maine, a friend pointed out a boat called Outer Limits. The owner wasn’t a science fiction fan or anything. He was a doctor, specializing in broken bones.
“Outer Limits” is the name of a VERY long and mogul-laden ski run at Killington Mountain in Vermont.
I’ve been there several times. There’s a lift that goes over the run. Many times I’ve thought “maybe, this time, I’ll give it a try.” But after five minutes going up past those impressive moguls, I change my mind.
Two of my favorites:
Stugots (and Stugots II) from The Sopranos
and
The Seaward from **Arrested Development ** (say it out loud…sounds like “The C Word.”). In season two there was a great exchange where Michael tells GOB, “Get rid of The Seaward.” to which their mother Lucille replied, “I’m not going anywhere!” God I loved that show. In the finale they’re on a different boat, and this one was actually called “The C-Word.”
There was a ship taken by pirates in the 18th century called the Protestant Ceasar. I always thought that was kind of a cool name for a ship.
Marc
USCSS The Nostromo.
A name to put fear in the hearts of everyone and an alien in the stomach of Kane.
We have a dentist in our harbour whose cruiser is named “Doc Holiday.”
When Pete Seeger needed to come up with the name of the sailing vessel and group that he planning to build to clean up the Hudson River he came up with the name “Clearwater”. This seems like a simple and perfect name.
The local Monmouth County group had a rundown little motor boat, always in need of work and maintained on a shoestring called the “Worthy Cause”.
I loved the Navy’s first Hydrofoil’s name: “The USS Pegasus”. By reputation, she flew over the water.
Jim
Niven’s Known Space stories have some interesting ship names:
Long Shot (an experimental Quantum 2 hyperdrive ship flown by Beowulf Schaeffer, which had no throttle)
Skydiver (a ship built to make a close exploratory approach to a neutron star)
Drunkard’s Walk (Larchmont Bellamy’s ship in Grendel)
Lying Bastard (the ship that took Louis Wu, Speaker-to-Animals, Nessus, and Teela Brown to Ringworld)
Schlock Mercenary occasionally has Ob’enn warships turn up. These sport names like Sword of Inevitable Justice, Staff of Unrelenting Order, and the (rechristened) Polysyllabic Destruction. 
On a completely different note, Steven Callahan wrote the book Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea about the time he spent on the Rubber Ducky III (a life raft).
My kayak was christened Thaitanic. I’d love to take credit for the idea, but I saw it on a boat once and it stuck.
I had an instructor at SWOS (or OCS; I forget which) who’d been an officer on Pegasus, and he told us a fascinating story about one night in the Caribbean.
They were traveling foil-born in the middle of the night, making full speed, when suddenly a terrific sound and shock rocked the ship. Immediately they began having trouble staying on course and foil-borne, so they raised the foil and limped back to Key West hull-borne.
The next morning it was discovered that the forward foil was badly damaged, and a whale vertebra was lodged in it.
My next boat is going to be called Mast Transit
The USS Monitor was the Union’s first ironclad during the Civil War, named by its designer, John Ericsson, because he thought it would prove a “severe monitor” (that is, a check upon the ambitions) of the Confederacy. When the Monitor stopped the CSS Virginia’s rampage and secured the blockade, he was proved right.
The USS Kearsarge, best known for its defeat of the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, was named after a mountain in New Hampshire, itself given an Indian name which means “notch-pointed mountain of pines.”
The British have a particular knack for using vivid adjectives to name their ships: Illustrious, Indefatigable, Indomitable, Glorious, etc. Despite the Alec Guiness movie and the later Star Trek connection, though, they never actually used the name Defiant.
Less seriously, the squalid, unpleasant rustbucket in the otherwise-forgettable Chris Elliot comedy Cabin Boy is named the SS Filthy Whore.
In The Cruel Sea is mentioned the merchie Jolly Nights. I will name mine Escapade.
An admiral of my acquaintance has (had) a yacht named Mufti.
I crewed in my first sailboat race aboard a friend’s boat, Rosinante. It was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. It means Glue.
I called my first sailboat Louise. In an old Popeye cartoon, Bluto sang *Every Little Breeze Seems To Whisper Louise * in a French accent. Louise is also my wife’s middle name.
Roy Disney’s big racing yacht is called Pyewacket.
If I ever manage to muster up the scratch for a boat, it will be the Lookfar, after Ged’s boat in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels. She had an eye painted on her prow, what’s better than that?
We had a cat called Pywacket when I was a kid, the name came from the movie Bell, Book and Candle. What a great name!
In the 17th century there was a Spanish ship known as Caca Fuego, can’t remember what it was actually named, because of the amount of cannons it carried.
Marc
I met a guy that named his fishing boat the Chickenship
Long time lurker here, but I had to register for this thread.
My all time favorite (fictional) ship name is In Amber Clad from Halo 2. The Halo universe is loaded with interesting names.
One more: Temporary Insanity II. Normally, the fact that it’s a repeat name would kill some of the coolness factors, but once you’ve looked at the picture…
:smack: 
Two boat names that stick in my head from days on the Chesapeake -
Camel of the Sea and a boat that was no doubt owned by a cardiologist - E Sea G
