Sunrise. This was the name of our boat when we first saw it in Newport harbor in the fall of 2007. It was the fourth boat we looked at and really we only looked at it because we wanted to see the full spectrum of boats in our length and price range. After that, every boat we looked at we compared to Sunrise, a Hallberg Rassy 38. Sunrise was a nice name we thought, one that we could easily keep... and we wanted to name our boat something that meant something to us. We finally registered her with the Coast Guard as Be Here Now II, named after little Be Here Now, our Seafarer Kestrel 23.

I had the new name made up out of vinyl letters, and tried to remove the old lettering. It would not budge! I was able to get the N of Newport, RI off after about 2 hours work! So Sunrise still is neatly lettered on the transom.

I have been reading outloud to my mother for a while. Recently we started rereading the book that started Lara and I thinking about putting my dream into action. Cruising At Last, by Elliott Merrick is a beautifully written book describing the joys and pitfalls of building and sailing a small boat on the East Coast. Lara and I had read it aloud to each other as we had coffee on crisp summer mornings as we bobbed in Porter Bay in the cockpit of little Be Here Now back in the summer of 2005. We then moved onto other books such as Beth Leonard's book, Blue Horizons...

So now we own our 1983 Hallberg Rassy, and I start rereading Cruising At Last. The last paragraph of the first chapter reads like this:
"The boat has a wide stripe of royal blue at the sheer, set off by varnished cabin, white topsides, and red bottom paint. We call our ship SUNRISE because she is a dream like "the sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes" that flames over the ocean on summer mornings..."

I stopped, and reread the sentence. Mom commented that I had already read that, and I should keep going.

Is this not just too crazy? Could it really be a coincidence that the boat we buy and the boat we were inspired by have the same name?! We both feel that this is too remarkable to ignore. So we are getting ready to file the appropriate paperwork with the Coast Guard to change the name back to SUNRISE.