SEAVIEW – Maybe it’s the fresh salty breeze, or the pounding surf, perhaps the shifting sands or, hey, just for fun – who really knows for sure? But whatever the cause, christening our beach houses with unusual and sometimes funny names is a time-honored tradition followed by many homeowners here on the Long Beach Peninsula.

Judging from the boat nameplates seen at local marinas, most boat owners follow the same custom – but that’s another feature story for another time.

The penchant for naming houses is practiced by vacation homeowners elsewhere, too, such as in the mountains or in most any resort area you can name. But for some reason the business of naming houses seems to be more prevalent along coastal beaches. Such house names are almost never found in the cities, for citified reasons I will leave to others to figure out.

As a matter of owners’ pride and to preserve historical records, some older beach homes, especially those dating to the late 1800s, have signs and plaques listing the year the house was built. (And that’s still another story I would like to explore sometime in the future.)

Rather than simply calling beach house names unusual, perhaps wacky or zany would be a better way to describe some of the names we saw on a recent survey trip around the area. We checked beach house names from Ilwaco northward to Seaview, Long Beach, Klipsan Beach, Ocean Park and on up north to Nahcotta and Oysterville, and this story includes some of the best and unusual that we found.

We didn’t have to go far to start with. Just within a few blocks on our Seaview street, K Place, we found these intriguing names on signs attached to beach houses: Clamalot, Windsong, Low Tide, Yeo-Ho, Green Gables, Chuck House, Grey Gull, Yellow Bird, Cottage Green, Harmony Lodge and Bev’s Beach Bungalow. House names such as those must represent decades of colorful family history in old Seaview, where many wealthy Portland families built summer homes in the late 1800s.

Just around the comer, on 37th Street in Seaview, is the familiar “Crank’s Roost” – a name chosen by the late Terence (Terry) O’Donnell, the award-winning writer and historian, for his hideaway cottage in Seaview. In an interview with the Observer in June 2000, O’Donnell explained the significance of the name “Crank’s Roost” when he said: “I am somewhat of a crank, and crank has two meanings: someone with odd ideas and a person who occasionally is irascible. I qualify on both counts.”

Next door to Crank’s Roost stands a stately older home named Sea Quest, its weathered gray cedar shakes so popular in this area. Not far away is a house name that is puzzling at first glance – Cape Nodinauf. (To decipher that one, just repeat the last word slowly, syllable by syllable.)

Near the comer of 37th and K Place a historic and resplendent Victorian mansion, the Schulderman-Collie house, has a distinguished and different sort of name on a plaque near the front door. The plaque designates the house as being listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are just a few of those on the Peninsula.

A couple of blocks away on K Place, rather than naming their house the Williams family took a different tack. They elected to paint the names of family members on separate wooden shingles. Depending on who is in town on a particular day, shingles with the appropriate names are hung on hooks on the front porch to announce who is at home.

Farther north on K Place, near the comer of 39th, is one of my favorite beach house names, which belongs in the zany category: It’s the Bat Cave – named, of course, for an incursion of a few bats in that house back in the 1960s. Owners of the Bat Cave hang out their sign only when they are in residence, and stash it inside while they’re away.

Because of its unique name, we selected the Bat Cave as one house to include more information about, and for that we went to the source: Mrs. Alice May (Robbie) Hathaway, matriarch of the family. Mrs. Hathaway, whose grandfather, John Robertson, built the house in 1883, said the house has sported several names over the years.

Originally it was called the Robertson house. Later it was known as the Robertson-McCracken house, and still later The Filling Station, so named “because of all the meals we served,” Mrs. Hathaway said. The bats came later. While two teen-aged boys slept in an upstairs dorm with the windows open and a light left on, several bats swooped into the room and caused quite a stir. Hence the house name.

“We kept the windows closed after that, the lights out and put up some screens to keep the bats out,” Mrs. Hathaway said. She lives in Eugene, Ore., and always spends her summers in Seaview, with frequent visits from her son, daughter and their extended families.

Join us now for a leisurely drive along the highways and byways of our Peninsula, searching for other whimsical and unusual beach house names. Let’s see what we found, and there are some doozies out there.

Starting in Ilwaco, we were surprised to find only a few houses with names to add to our story. And that illustrates one problem with any survey such as this. We knew we probably missed some worthy candidates, and no doubt some of those were in Ilwaco. The ones we found there included the L.D. Williams House, Bills Corner, Shiray Ranch and Marian’s.

Moving on up to Long Beach, we discovered a good number of imaginative house names, including Sea Hearth, Spindrift, Land’s End, Gull’s Nest, just plain Beach House and also Our Beach House. Up the street there’s The Nautilus, Spooner’s Lean Too, Woolfs Idle Hour, Sandown, Quit Yo Worry, Captain’s Haven and The Sand Box.

Around the comer you’ll find The Tides, Smiles, Gull’s Nest, Cooley’s Rest Home, Our Little House, WindanSea and Sea Change.

Up in Ocean Park, to name a few, we found Trevor’s Place, Erik Acres, King’s Haven, Beech-Eze, Ivenhoe, Loma Inn, Tootie’s, Shangri-La and Rooster’s Ranch. Winning first prize in Ocean Park, hands down, was a house named The Bug’s Ear, and there’s no word on where that one came from.

Pickings were slim in Nahcotta and Oysterville, although we probably missed some great names in both communities for our story. Homes in Oysterville’s historic district all have plaques listing names of pioneer owners and builders, but those, too, would be a story for another time.

The first prize for the most names, and some of the best of the lot, went to Seaview. We also voted on best of the bunch, and the winners were Bat Cave, Clamalot and The Bug’s Ear, in no particular order.

To round off our unofficial survey of the most memorable beach house names here on the Peninsula, we decided to include a couple of street names as well. So be careful if you try to drive very far up a side road off the highway to Ocean Park. A local resident has fashioned a wooden sign naming the road “Broken Axle Drive” – and I have no reason to doubt it.

The other street name that deserves mention here probably isn’t an official street name at all. Down in Seaview there’s a garage with a street name sign straight from Hollywood nailed over the door. It says “Marilyn Monroe Blvd” and it’s right here on the Long Beach Peninsula.