I think the Palau Aggressor is becoming a Peter Hughes boat!

[RJP]

Why not Truk instead, give the Odyssey some competition?

Like bringing a knife to a gun fight...

 

[EVFleet]

May 2002, and you're right, it was the Sun Dancer. I just remembered it as "the Peter Hughes boat" and put that together with Star Dancer when they went back and forth to PNG, but now you dredged up an earlier memory from my 2000 trip to Yap where I recall chatting with a group of divers in Guam who just got in from Palau and were wearing Sun Dancer T-shirts. All those fancy names just confuse me. Why can't they take the Aggressor's cue and rename it the Palau Dancer?

They could, I'm sure, renaming boats definitely makes things easier to remember and makes them arguably easier to market. But liveaboards are expensive to operate already, and the fees and paperwork to change names can be considerable. Keeping the name non-specific gives more flexibility. Not to mention that long-standing maritime superstition holds that it's unlucky to change the name of a boat.

I've done both (Caribbean Explorer I and II and Nimrod Explorer (now sold), and Turks & Caicos Explorer II) - in hindsight, I should've just kept the names the same for all the boats, for flexibility's sake. The Humboldt Explorer, which will start service in a few months in Galapagos, doesn't have too specific a name but won't operate anywhere else so it doesn't really matter.

There! More info than you wanted on the rationale behind boat names....

- Clay