Sailing New Caledonia; Name It

29/7/2017

Canal Wodin, New Caledonia

Name It

Sadly, after nearly two months in New Caledonia (a French colony), my French language skills have not improved.

I engaged our yacht agent Herve in the briefest conversation yesterday and asked him how I was doing. Now you must remember that I am his customer, so it was in his interest to be extremely diplomatic. He replied that my French was not perfect. He just neglected to say how far from perfect it was. Probably didn’t have time to measure that gap!

It doesn’t help with the names of places in New Caledonia a mixture between French and the local indigenous people known as Canack’s.

When asked where we are headed, we must reply that we are off to Uere. I have heard Australian accents on the vhf radio pronouncing this place as “You ‘ere, you erey” or worse “you rear”. This bay has now adopted a new title with us. It is now simply known as where “Leanne had her birthday bash”.

Also producing a bit of difficulty are places such as UA, UE, UIE, UO and We. You’d think that these would be easy, but apparently if you just say it the way it is written you can get it quite wrong. One would’nt want to sail all the way to We, if we were supposed to be going to Ua (pronounced Wah…I think).

The one place I thought I was having no trouble at all with was Isle De Pins. I was even getting what I thought was quite a French sounding twist when I said to people that we had been down to Aisle de Pens.

That was until we had Tristan and Claudia from Frozzie over for drinks. Claudia is French. She grew up in the south of France and being a teacher, she did have a giggle, well quite a laugh actually, at my expense, as in my best French accent I announced that we would like to go back to the aisle of male genitals.

Since then, we have all tried to get it right. Some of our group are now saying Aisle De Parns, Others Aisle de Pahhns and I have even heard the odd Aisle de Porns, which would probably go with my Aisle De Pens.

Isle Amedee is another simple looking name, but, has had some interesting pronunciations offered up by we English speaking numpties. Armaidee, Ameddy and Aimdee are some that have been offered up. Goodness knows what these are interpreted as by French person listening to our radio chatter. Even poor old Island Mato has been called MARTO.

At the moment we are heading up Canal Wodin to meet a couple of boats at Isle Casy, which is hard to get wrong. But from there we may go to Gadji or Gudji depending on your take. Gadji or Goudji is on the ISLE OF PINES (That's my Australian Translation). That’s how I am saying it from here on, because maybe it’s just me, but I feel a little weird about inviting others to sail down to the island of the male genitals.