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Boat names get our attention. Not all of them, mind you. We have a pretty good sense of what “Dawn Treader” means and won’t have further questions, but if your boat has an uncommon name, like “Molly Bloom” or “Fred” or “Alonzo’s Sea”, you’ve made us curious. We’ll likely to want to ask you about it.

John and two of his carved loons

In June, a Catalina 25 named “Gavia Immer” from Sioux City, Iowa tied up at the Town Dock. The name intrigued us.

Gavia Immer Gavia Immer, we kept repeating. It sounded so uncommon, so mystical. Gah VEE ah, Im MARE. We imagined that’s how it would be pronounced. And when we said it that way, it conjured up images of some Indian Ocean god of the wind or waves.

Turns out the name was far more common than we could have imagined.

John Funke, who has been living on“Gavia Immer” since 1997 says the name means “Common Loon” — ‘gavia’ being the genus, and ‘immer’ the species. (One hint might have been the loon silhouette painted just below the name.)

“It’s my favorite bird.” John says, of the bird that swims great lengths underwater. It dives in, he says, “without a splash. It’s beautiful.”

Down below on “Gavia Immer” John has several carved loons, loon prints and other representations of the bird he so loves. He confides that “Gavia Immer” was not his only choice for a boat name. He had toyed with naming the Catalina 25 after the family name for the loon, Gaviidae. But then he learned that a mall in Minneapolis was already calling itself that and he didn’t really want people to think he’d named the boat for a shopping mall.

The boat lists “Sioux City, Iowa” as its port of call, not a common sight in Oriental. It’s there on the transom of “Gavia Immer” because Iowa is where John grew up. He’s not lived there in decades —- “I couldn’t do the winters anymore,” he says —- but now that he’s living on the boat, Iowa has again become his legal residence because as he puts it with a laugh, “You have to be from somewhere.”

Iowa is actually more than a legal residence. It is where John first learned to sail fifty years ago. It happened indirectly, through a boat left behind by his father, who died when he was young.

His father had been a fisherman, John says. But fishing with his father’s boat was “not a lot of fun,” he adds. “Typically I had to row the boat. And rowing was hard for a kid, because the boat was heavy.”

In those few years after the Second World War, outboard motors were not as widespread as they are now. For a 12-year old who didn’t like rowing, there remained only one other option.

“I discovered sail boats,” John says. “Being able to go across water without oars or a motor… that was a discovery.” When he says this, fifty years later, John is inside a coffee shop looking across the rainy street at the Oriental Town Dock and the boat he lives on. He smiles a lot and laughs as he talks about his early awe at this idea of sailing. “It was remarkable.. almost spiritual. It was amazing to be able to do that with the elements.”

He learned to sail Sunfish-type boats, and spent hours on the lakes of Iowa — Storm Lake, Spirit Lake, Okoboji Lake. He recalls working hard at learning to sail… and at keeping his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches dry. “I would hang them from the boom,” he says. “It was the only dry place on the boat.”

Though he moved away from Iowa to go to college — “I went to school in San Antonio, Texas and discovered the rest of the world wasn’t frozen” — the attraction to boats stayed with him. He eventually moved to Palm Springs, California (another non-frozen place) and worked for decades as navigator on large ships that assisted oil companies in scouting underwater oil sites. The work took him to the seas off of the East, West and Gulf Coasts and to Africa. Summers he would spend sailing on the Great Lakes, around the loons that inspired this boat’s name.

When he retired 6 years ago he had “Gavia Immer” trucked to San Diego, then spent years outfitting her before cruising off the Pacific Coast of the US and Mexico. John’s been working his way up from Florida since 2001.

He says he had planned to do more sailing in Mexico and the Pacific, but that changed after 9/11. He is now “doing stuff locally, on the US coastline.” John and Gavia Immer were headed toward the Chesapeake when they stopped in Oriental in May.

He happened upon Oriental after hearing about it over the radio.

John is a ham radio operator (K0GPN) and notes that there are a lot of amateur radio operators in the Oriental area. (He’s learned that “they meet once a month for luncheon at Ms Sils’”) With so many radio operators based around here, he says, “Oriental is talked about a lot.”

If not for hearing that chatter over the air, John may not have come to Oriental. “It’s a well-kept secret,” he says, and points out that the town is “off the ICW enough so that you have to make an exit” from the waterway to come here.

By all appearances, even on a rainy Saturday afternoon, John appeared happy he’d made the effort. “You don’t realize the magnetism,” he says, “until you get here.”

So, how much longer will he live on Gavia Immer? “Who knows?” John talks about not making plans, but says he figures he has “five more years of sailing.” Or perhaps a combination of sailing and some time on land. “I’m thinking of going to work, “ John says. “I’m kinda bored with retirement. I miss the social part of work.”

He laughs at how this may not jive with the name he has given his boat. “It’s ironic that the loon is an isolationist type bird.” Solitude, John says, is “nice but I like to turn it on and off. A quiet anchorage is good, but there’s nothing wrong with four or five cruising boats in it.”

Posted Monday July 14, 2003 by Melinda Penkava

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