How Two Fish Got Her Name

I love knowing the history of names.   Why was our old London neighborhood named Belgravia?  To me, it was evocative of Russia but the true story is more pedestrian.  The naming of Two Fish also lacks a brave hero, any odd twists of fate, and even a 100 year history, but it is a milestone in our journey.

Ever since we signed the contract, we debated our boat name. Lots of people choose names that describe themselves or their past lives. Someone suggested the clever pun “Current Sea”, which sounds like currency trading, Jason’s job.  However, this violated a few of our name rules.  1) NO PUNS.  2) Name must evoke or describe the boat not the crew.  3) Avoid flashy New York finance references. 4) Must be easy to pronounce.

The next name we considered was “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”.  This 45-letter word (also known as P45)  is the longest word ever to appear in an english dictionary.  But this violated our “easy to pronounce on the VHF” rule and it is a medical term, so might be a bit of a downer.   The final rule was the name had to be a politically neutral term.   Which eliminated ‘World Conquest’ and ‘Aqua Alliance’.

I can’t remember all of the iterations, I liked Green Bananas mostly because of a great song, the Wrong Bananas,  that I can still listen to a thousand times. It sort of reminds me of my past and likely future foreign food shopping experiences. But back to our naming game – in the same color and fruit vane we thought about Blue Papaya for no particular reason. I tried to convince Jason that Cardamom would be a good name but it went against the easy to spell and understand criterion. Jason tried to convince me that Bulldog would be good. Jason also floated a few old America’s Cup names such as Courageous but we both agreed this was too pompous for a cruising boat.

And then it hit us, well more snuck up on us via a process of elimination.  The book, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” was stuck in my brain as my nephew had recently read it to me, so I suggested Two Fish (two hulls, fish in the water, etc.). We took a poll while visiting friends in Ithaca and it seemed to be acceptable. It started growing on us too, despite a snarky article Jason read ranting about catamaran owners who use two in their boat name.

Time to progress to the logo. We found an outfit called logomojo who seemed to have produced some reasonable logos in the past and were open to infinite iterations. I didn’t want to start with preconceived notions (bad choice) so we described what we were looking for and asked them to a) be creative and fun and b) take the focus away from the words.

Here are the results from round one.

Round One Choices

It was a good thing that we paid a bit extra for the infinite iteration option. These might be excellent for a couple of sportfishermen but that wasn’t what we were going for. Oh, and didn’t we say focus away from the words? We gave them our feedback and eagerly awaited round two.

Ideas for Next Round

Round 2

Now we felt like we were making some progress. We even liked the triangle shaped version (even though the sail-like background bothered Jason because the forward sail was pointing the wrong way.)

Imagining the Future

After another round, we had something that we could imagine on our spinnaker. (All of those years of making powerpoint presentations have finally paid off). We had some discussions around colors – Jason likes classic blues and chartreuse is my favorite color. It wasn’t hard to zero in on the blue and green fish. After a bit more powerpoint fun, adding pop out eyes and some little fish around the logo, we finally feel that we have a logo. Did I mention that we are on round 8? We’ll keep the triangle two fish for T shirts and key rings and use the two fish in various forms on sails, the boat and, of course, our web site. I think after one or two more iterations with logomojo, we might be ready.

Final Answer?

—Gail

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