Online contest ends to name new research vessel, ‘Boaty McBoatface’ is the winner

In a joke gone wrong (or maybe very, very right depending on how you look at it), a $285 million (£300 million) brand new state-of-the-art U.K. research vessel may now find itself named the very majestic “RRS Boaty McBoatface”.

According to CNN, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had previously opened up a poll to name the ship, asking for people to submit suggestions that were inspirational. More than 7,000 suggestions were submitted, but when former BBC radio anchor James Hand jokingly suggested “Boaty McBoatface,” it rapidly became an internet favorite.

The website for the poll actually began to struggle thanks to the enormous number of people who went online to vote, and when the poll closed Saturday (April 16), “Boaty McBoatface” was the clear winner, with 124,109 votes.

NERC might decide to go a different direction

However, there is no actual guarantee the NERC will use the name. “We’ve had an extremely high volume of suggestions and will now review all of the suggested names,” they wrote on the poll website. “The final decision will be announced in due course.”

In fact, the name may very well go to the second place winner, “RRS Poppy-Mai,” which is the name of an infant girl with terminal cancer. In third place was the “RRS Henry Worsley,” named for an explorer who died in January after attempting to cross Antarctica unaided. And in fourth was the the nearly-as-magnificent-as-Boaty McBoatface name, “RRS It’s bloody cold here”.

NERC may yet decide “Boaty McBoatface” is perhaps a little too silly for the 420-foot-long (129 m), 15,000-metric-ton vessel, which is the U.K.’s largest and most advanced research ship ever. There are 20 labs onboard, as well as enough equipment to fill nine double-decker buses (plus two small helicopters). Starting in 2019, she will carry researchers to both poles to help them study the effects of climate change on ice and sea-level rise.

The reality NERC needs to understand is that “Boaty McBoatface” is incredibly benign for the internet. For example, Mountain Dew once ran an online contest called “Dub the Dew” in hopes of finding a user-sourced name for a new flavor of soda. The results were extremely offensive.

We’re in camp Boaty McBoatface.

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Image credit: NERC

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