The culmination of 12 months work designing a boat name logo finally came to fruition today.

Naming a boat is a traumatic ordeal, especially when you rarely agree with your partner. Compromise is always the outcome and while neither of you are completely happy you are both relatively happy.

And so Eucalyptus came into being. It is quintessentially Australian, but, Shelley said, they are all around the world, yes I said, but we sent them there! What about coolabah, a type of eucalypt, no that reminds me of the wine cask, I said. I quite like viminalis, that is the manna gum that koalas eat, but I would have to explain that one every time. So back to Eucalyptus. Now that we have agreed on that name, let’s see if it is already a registered boat in Australia. There was one little sailing boat in Tasmania called Eucalypt, so we had a win, which was a relief because I couldn’t go through that again.

I do like a bit of theatre so I then began planning what sort of signage we would have on the boat. Mecerdes Villar Lopez is an artist from A Coruna in Spain, she designed the Women Who Sail and Women Who Sail Australia logos, as well as many other lovely brand logos. I contacted her and gave her a brief that changed weekly with the wind. A koala on the branch, no koala on the branch, yellow blossoms, no, red blossoms, yes definetely red blossoms! We settled on the red blossoms and Mercedes put two into the design, one for each of us little flowers.

La Creation, La Rochelle, printed the decals and affixed them, the result is just as I had hoped, it looks great and we certainly will not be missed. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not.