Subscribe to RSS FeedLet’s face it, we've all been assigned a serial number in the form of a social security number.It seems everywhere you go these days, someone's asking for your "social." I guess that soft lexicon aims at trying to make it seem less Orwellian. How you wonder am I going to segue into something salty? Try this on for size, your boat has its own kind of "social".
A vessel manufacturer must identify each boat produced or imported with a hull identification number. The HIN, as it's called, must consist of twelve characters. The first three characters identify the manufacturer, characters four through eight are the manufacturer's serial number, characters nine and ten typically indicate the date of certification or manufacture, and characters eleven and twelve indicate the model year (i.e., "82" for 1982). Characters nine and ten can be decoded by understanding that character nine will be an English letter of the alphabet with January being "A", February being "B", etc. Character ten must be the last digit of the year of manufacture or certification. A visual guide to decoding your boat's social can be found below.
You can decode a portion of your social security number as well so as to learn the date and state of issuance. There's probably a clever observation to be made between a vessel's HIN and a person's social security number, but nothing's coming to me at the moment. Writing about social security numbers makes me feel like I've turned out of the harbor and into a gray sea scudded with chop and pressed low under a dark sky. A sense, I guess, of something unpleasant making its way ashore.
Underway and making way.
--- JKF
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