Or, the Silver Dollar/ Silver Dolar from the film ‘Local Hero’ (the fishermen can’t agree on how many l’s there are…
Not the exact name but…saw a yacht off of Miami beach called “I owe the Internal Revenue $36,000”
You beat me to it.
My all-time favorite is HMS Unapproachable.
OTOH, the US Navy went from naming aircraft carriers after cool battles (Lexington, Yorktown, Midway) to naming them after lame-o’s that you never heard of (Carl Vinson, John C. Stennis).
I see a lot of funny or stupid boat names in my travels, and a lot of funny ones too.
Racing sailboats are the best:
Fat Bob
Spirit of Elvis
Crash Test Dummies
Nixon was Cool
Mary Don’t Surf (the horror, the horror)
The Other White Meat (the tender was named “Tastes Like Chicken!”)
Ho Lotta Luck
There’s a real beat-up little runabout in our marina named “Never Again II”. That just cracks me up.
I do like the names the RN gives ships and subs. The next generation of Fleet submarines (equivalent of USN SSNs) are the Astute-class:
HMS Astute (second use of that name)
HMS Ambush (ditto)
HMS Artful (ditto)
HMS Audacious (fourth use of that name)
They will replace, more or less, five of the Swiftsure-class (Sovereign, Superb, Sceptre, Spartan and Splendid) and both of the Trafalgar-class (Trafalgar and Turbulent).
(as far as I remember, it’s only the submarine fleet that uses names starting with the same letter)
Well, there were the Revenge class battleships, sometimes called “the Five Rs” including the Royal Oak; and the Repulse and Reknown, (which appear to have been radically redisgned Revenges, hmm.) too. The RN has had a pattern, at least, of trying to make sister ships have similar names.
Yanno, with 8 ships of the name HMS Vanguard, you’d think I’d consider it a pretty good ship’s name.
Well, I’d have had no problem with the name until the ninth of July, 1917. That was when HMS Vanguard, for reasons that are only guessed at today, blew up at anchor, taking all but two of her crew with her.
Let me restate that: The ship blew up for no known reason, while at anchor.
Now I’d let things go, except my mind is something of a lumber room: all sorts of odd things fall into it. I’d heard that it’s a tradition in the Royal Navy to never reuse the name of a ship lost to enemy action. Which is why there’s no HMS Hood, today.
But there’s an HMS Vanguard!
And that’s the second ship of that name since the one that blew up at harbor in 1917.
:eek:
As a properly superstitious sailor type - I’m seriously discombobulated.
Of course, part of it is that I have a petty problem with ships that sink on purpose anyways. They don’t need hints on other ways to kill their crews.
You’re right: Japanese merchantmen have “Maru” appended to their names, warships do not. It means “circle” (as in round trip).
Some of my favorites:
From the Wing Commander series, there is the TCS Tiger’s Claw, a rather unusual name compared to any other Terran ships we see in the Wing Commander universe.
From the Honor Harrington series, it’s hard to beat Sovereign of Space, but the Hexapuma gets bonus points for it’s nickname: “The Angry Kitty” (for context, in the Honor Harrington universe, a Hexapuma is a creature native to the planet Sphinx, and basically looks like a giant mountain lion with two sets of legs. Very dangerous, and largely the reason why most people on Sphinx own high-powered firearms, unlike their fellow Manticoran citizens on Gryphon and Manticore)
In the Chronicles of Narnia books are the Dawn Treader and the Splendour Hyaline. I always thought those were cool.
Actually it’s Nasty Kitty.
When my high school calculus teacher retired he bought a boat and named it Aftermath.
About 20 years ago I saw a sailboat named Panta Rei.
If I ever get my shit together and actually buy a boat, I’m gonna steal that name.