LORA LEE
We had a great friend named Lora Lee who loved the beach and Jimmy Buffett music. She loved our children and her dream was to have a baby of her own. Lora and her fiancé found out she was pregnant a few months before their wedding and it was the happiest time of their lives. Then Lora started to have terrible back pains. Her doctor said it was just due to the pregnancy, but the pain kept getting worse. After seeing a specialist, they found out she had breast cancer that had spread to her spine. She was given the choice of aborting the baby and starting aggressive treatment or carrying the baby until the term and taking her chances. She chose to keep the baby and he was born healthy, but it was too late for Lora. She died three months later on the day before Mother's Day.
One night I had a dream that our family went out to the boat, and as we boarded my wife Linda asked, "When did you decide on the name?" When I looked up at the back of the dock box on the top deck there it was in big red letters: LORA LEE. When I told my family about the dream we agreed to name the boat LORA LEE. We always said if Lora was still alive she'd want to be with us on the boat every weekend, and now she is.
Mark and Linda Helling
Brookville Lake, Ind.
Drift Away
We went to a New Year’s Eve party just a few months after we were married. At the party we realized we had never danced together. So the next song the band played we decided to get up and dance. The song was “Drift Away.” As we started trying to come up with a boat name several years later, my husband James said he knew the perfect name, Drift Away.
I thought it was such a romantic notion that we even hung the lyrics of the song on the wall in the boat. Now, not only are we making memories out on our houseboat, we also have the memory of our first dance together with us too.
Ashley Eaton
Westmoreland, Tenn.
Off Course
Our boat name is fairly simple. We have had our 1995 Lakeview for a couple of years now and it's our third houseboat. We wanted a name that was personal to us. We live on the 15th hole at Tournament Club of Iowa and love to golf and boat. So we named it Off Course. We incorporated the ships wheel along with a green and a 15-hole pin flag.
Matt McNulty
Polk City, Iowa
Riverfront Property
This name started with a 25-foot SeaRay that we had and slipped on a river in Monona, Wis., that connects Lake Monona & Lake Waubesa. One afternoon while we were sitting on our boat admiring the pretty homes on the other side of the river, I made the comment to my husband that I was glad we didn't have to pay the taxes on our “riverfront property” that the people with the pretty homes do. That’s when we came up with the name Riverfront Property. We then moved up to a bigger SeaRay a year later, which was Riverfront Property II, and then two years after that, we purchased our 63-foot SkipperLiner houseboat and we have been year-round liveaboards since 1999. We now live on our houseboat in Dubuque, Iowa, which is on the beautiful Mississippi River; hence we are now on Riverfront Property III.
Lynnette & Brandon Kettle
Dubuque, Iowa
Do you have a story behind your boat name that you’d like to share? Drop us an email at katie@houseboatmagazine.com; we’d love to hear it.