The lingua franca of the shipping world is English, if you look up lingua franca in Wikipedia it describes it as a vehicular language, or one used and understood by many, not being their native language.
Someone should tell the French that they should be speaking English on the VHF radio when communicating with ships, or English that can be understood at least, last night the vessel traffic channel at Joburg Normandy was trying to communticate with a South Korean ship, the report usually takes 2 minutes and has a standard format which can be found in the radio handbook that all ships should have, ours went smoothly but this ship Carl Alexander had a tough time. Imagine if you can a French lady speaking English on a radio with an Allo allo dialect and a South korean speaking like the Spitting image version of Ester Rantzen with extra teeth and mouth wide open.
Joburg traffic: “wet ass yir nam in cillsin, cars in spid?”(What is your name and callsign, course and speed?)
Carl Alexander: “rees wapreet” (please repeat)
Joburg TX:”wet ass yir nam in cillsin, cars in spid?”
Carl Alexander: “rees wapreet”
Joburg TX:”wet ass yir NAM, plese spill yir NAM” (What is you name please spell you name)
Carl Alexander: “Harley(charlie) alra(alpha) lomeo(romeo) reema(lima), this went on for a while
Joburg TX:”plis repit”(please repeat)eventually after several attempts the first piece of info was exchanged
Then came the last port of call next port of call section, the Carl Alex was loaded with iron ore from Port Walcott, Australia
Joburg TX:”wit ees yir list pirt if coll?”( what is your last port of call)
Carl Alexander: “rees wapreet”
Joburg TX:”wit ees yir list pirt if COLL? yir list lodding pirt?(what is your last port of CALL?your last loading port)
Carl Alexander:”forh wankah”(port walcott)
I’m on the floor at this stage
Then she asks him to spell it, more misunderstanding
Of course now the French lady suspects piss taking and gets up her gallic heckles
After about a half an hour, they get to how much iron ore is on board and where the destination port is, meanwhile the information being transmitted by AIS (see http://www.ruttledge.se/?p=116 for AIS) all the time, after about 45 minutes they get finished
2 hours later, the Carl Alexander passes Cap Gris Nez traffic, and the whole rigmarole starts again, the exasperation radiating from the VHF, this is just routine traffic folks, God help us when something serious happens.
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