My name stems from my lifeguarding days and was the unofficial name of my boat (her official name was the
Julia Fry, but I thought it would be misleading to call myself Julia), the
Navarino. The name is taken from the Battle of Navarino, the last great sea battle fought by wooden ships in which an allied British, French and Russian force defeated a Turkish and Egyptian armada at Navarino (now Pylos) in Southern Greece. I shortened it to Nav after a while as it's a bit awkward to say the whole thing all the time.
Navarino was always the workhorse of our little fleet. She lacked the raw speed of the rapid response boat and her older brother
Peter Fry (imaginatively nicknamed
Thunderchild) was everyone's darling due to its exquisitely crafted hull, so the
Nav got all the dirty jobs. By the time I became coxswain her transom (the strongest bit of the boat, around which the rest is built) had already been split in a towing accident. Although the repair was good and her operational capacity was little affected, the transom eventually went rotten along the site of the damage and
Navarino could no longer support the powerful engines we used in the rescue service. She was a tough old boat, able to endure astonishing abuse when the situation required it. Her finest hour was also my own, plucking four people from a smashed sailing cruiser in Force 6-7 winds off Chi Spit. She can now be found chugging round the (downright dangerous) Stoney Cove scuba diving centre in Leicestershire.
Here is a picture of me buzzing the half-sunken Normanton Church aged fifteen with
Navarino, sometime before her first refit. It's funny that in later years I would have had very stern words for anyone who took a boat that close, and at such speed, to those rocks!

Q. Why do Communists drink herbal tea?
A. Because proper tea is theft.