Keith--- Sorry about the name screw-up. I did the same thing to Murray, too. I've always been crappy with names, which isn't an excuse, just the reality.
I was just given a book for Christmas by good friends who've taken cruises with us in the Gulf Islands a couple of times. It's a new book called
Landfalls by Naomi Williams. It's a novel about the expedition of Jean-Francois de La Perouse. It has gotten very good reviews and I'm looking forward to reading it.
Perhaps the result of a premonition, La Perouse sent his expedition journals home to France during his visit to what is now Kamchatka. They were taken overland on a year-long trek by one of the scientists who'd been on his voyage. La Perouse then carried on south to his ultimate fate in the southwestern Pacific.
Wondering if his journals had ever been translated into English I did an extensive search and found that they indeed had been translated by the Hakluyt Society in England into a two-volume set. An further search eventually got me a pristine copy of this set.
The name La Perouse has been intriguing to me for many years, starting in Hawaii when I created the sound track for a documentary about the string of islands and atolls that stretch from Hawaii to Midway. Two of these were discovered and named by the La Perouse expedition. Later I learned he'd been the first French naval explorer to visit the Pacific Northwest, BC coast, and SE Alaska. In fact, what is today called Lituya Bay in Alaska was originally named La Perouse Bay when his expedition reached it. The La Perouse glacier in SE Alaska has retained its name.
Being half French myself (my father was a French citizen), ever since learning the significance of the name and something of the person who bore it I thought it would be a good name for a boat.
Our first "real" boat, a 17' Arima which we still have, is too insignificant a vessel for such a significant name. So we named it
Malolo, the name of the boat I did so much fishing on in Hawaii and which means "flying fish." It's also the word for "crazy," I guess because a fish that flies is a pretty crazy notion.
When we decided in 1998 to acquire a cruising boat of our own we had no problem deciding what to name it.
I'm within sight of retirement but we have no reason to replace this boat. Back in 1997/98 we talked about what we'd want to do with a cruising boat in the PNW/BC coast/SE Alaska region while I was working and then eventually after retirement and realized there was absolutely no difference. So we determined what make and model of boat would do what we wanted to do and bought one.
We have more recently developed an interest in a different kind of boating in a different part of the world and have taken the steps necessary to pursue this interest. But we will retain our PNW boat as we still have a lot of things we want to do with it.
