50k Boat Names

A data journalist analyzed over 50,000 boat names from NOAA's vessel traffic data, revealing creative expressions like puns, pop culture references, and jokes that reflect boat owners' personalities and wealth. The sample comes from Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmitters on larger commercial and recreational vessels, with pleasure craft making up 43% of the boats in the dataset. The analysis highlights that boat ownership in the US skews heavily white (82.9%) and wealthy, with annual expenses ranging from $15,000 to $40,000.