"Ola!"

Three hundred miles in, Coach started calling me Captain Sparrow.


It started with a story. We had endured a tough night of headwinds and rough seas. On Day Two, the winds finally calmed and the seas flattened. We switched on the motor to keep pace. The conversation picked up. There was some sort of logical context that got him started, but I can't recall what it was. John Hoopes told us about how he once shared texts with a famous disc jockey named Diplo.


"What was his name? Dick Blow?" Chris asked, not able to hear above the noise of the engine, wind, and waves.


"No, Diplo, you moron. Diplo was his name," the two Johns and I replied, bursting with laughter.


Without skipping a beat, John O'Riordan then began addressing Chris as "Dick." The first alias had been hatched.


John O said the new name was only fitting for a man with a boat named "Swallow." Though this might seem a bit pejorative, the subtlety reflected the friendly teasing between the Irishman and the Englishman, which Dick gave as much as he took.


Actually, the first nom de mer belonged to John O'Riordan. To distinguish one John from the other, we took to addressing John O'Riordan as "Trapper John," a name assigned to him earlier by a band of sailing mates with too many Johns among them. John sailed a Trapper 500 at the time, so he became Trapper John. Another John sailed a Moody sailboat. He became Moody John, and so forth.


But the Trapper moniker didn’t stick.


Soon after Dick was born, John Hoopes started addressing Trapper John as “Uncle Bob” after the curious Irish phrase “Bob’s Your Uncle.” Neither John nor I had ever heard this colloquialism until our return to Ireland. Within days of landing, we had heard it several times, first from Hugh Gibson, Windleblo’s winter guardian, and then from our Personal Survival Training course instructor, the one with the Deep Cork accent, who used it to describe the good fortune of finding one’s way into a life raft (as discreet from still being in the sinking ship).


We pieced together that “Bob’s Your Uncle” is an expression akin to “The Bees Knees” or “All’s Well That Ends Well” or “Happy Trails Are Here Again,” and connotes goodness and righteousness. John O’Riordan by this time had unwittingly wormed his way into our hearts and minds as a trustworthy, good humored, extremely likable fellow, so the nickname stuck, for the moment.

With his new name established, Uncle Bob was now bent on assigning everyone new identities. Chris was now Dick Blow. He was Uncle Bob. But what would John and I be called?

Uncle Bob woke up on the morning of Day Three and announced that I would hereafter be called “Captain Sparrow,” presumably after the character Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean. I found this uncanny as it is the exact same nickname given to me entirely independently by Martin Neumayer who, along with Chris (now a.k.a. Dick), crewed on last year’s North Sea crossing. As far as I know, Uncle Bob had no knowledge of this previously assigned title, which made the announcement even more impressive.

As for John Hoopes? Again, Uncle Bob had an answer. Later on Day Two, he started calling him “Manuel” in honor of his Spanish speaking abilities, which would soon come in handy. Though it rounded out the assigning of new names, this one didn’t seem to win universal approval, and everyone except Uncle Bob continued to call John John.

In organic fashion, the last new name of the voyage emerged by the end of the final day of the crossing. We made landfall at La Coruna after 82 hours at sea, a full day ahead of our estimate. The final night had been somewhat sporty, with the wind touching 30 knots and the seas reaching four meters on occasion, qualifying as Beaufort Force 7 and making the crossing's final morning a proverbial “sleigh ride.”

To celebrate, we explored La Coruna, which was a much bigger town than I expected. Set on  a promontory in the entrance of an estuary in a large gulf, La Coruna is Spain’s seventeenth largest city. It serves as a manufacturing and commerce center for the region. While tourism is an important part of the economy, the tourists are mainly other Spaniards, which mutes any effects as a “tourist town.” The streets were filled with natives, not sunburned northern Europeans.

Starting from a stately central square, we walked up and down several narrow streets offering various attractions. Siesta had ended, it was Friday evening, and the streets were starting to come alive. Shops featured assorted Galician products. There were bakeries, fresh produce stands, coffee shops, and butchers shops, the latter all with large smoked hams hanging from the rafters. And there was quite a selection of restaurants, many with open air seating where diners enjoyed appetizing seafood. To sample, we stopped and ordered cervezas and pulpas – octopus – which, along with the spiced ham, is a Galician signature dish.

We hopped from one restaurant or bar to another, steering Uncle Bob clear of the many Irish themed bars, reminding him that he was not in Spain to drink Guinness. As the evening wore on, the streets filled with light hearted, let-the-good-times-roll people. Our perceptions of them were undoubtedly colored by our euphoria at having completed our mission, plus consumption of beers now becoming too many to count. None-the-less, the people were friendly and the atmosphere gregarious.

By the end of the evening, John had taken to addressing Uncle Bob as "Coach," due, I surmised, to John's admiration of Uncle Bob's ease of fitting in to the party atmosphere. When Coach started threatening to take us to an all night disco where he would show us his "robot dance," we knew we were in for it. Since this is just the behavior John would want to emulate when he reaches his 50's, we knew Uncle Bob had a new disciple.

With that, the final alias of the voyage had arrived.