At the weekend I passed the harbour. Docked was a ship - an offshore supply vessel - with a most unfortunate name: NAO POWER. 
NAI is Nordic American Offshore, of course, but the homophone is unfortunate, to say the least. And surely they want MOAH POWER!
I don’t get it.
Isn’t it pronounced “Now Power”?
Maybe it’s “No Power”?
It doesn’t make sense to me either. In English, “nao” would be pronounced close to “now,” not “no.” (As far as I know, the OP is not Portuguese, in which “ñao” means “no.”)
(Or “En Ay Oh Power”, for that matter… I have no idea.)
Come on, people! It’s pronounced “no power”, sideways. It’s a weak joke, but not THAT bad.
Could have been the NAO Voyager, or the NAO Yusimi (and it’s sister ship, NAO U’dont), or the NAO Unno.
(At least it wasn’t Powergenitalia.com.)
That’s nao so funny.
It works as “no” if you imagine Christopher Walken saying it.
“WOW! There’s nao power!”
What an interesting looking vessel. I wonder how it would handle a heavy sea. Even moderately heavy. It sort of looks like it’s designed to plow through waves, not ride them.
A bad boat name would be Watery Death Trap.
Worse would be Sinky McSinkface.
HMS Drowning Is The Least Of Your Worries
I used to keep track of ships visiting our port on marinetraffic.com, which allows you to go anywhere in the world and see which ships are in what ports. Sometimes I’d wander the globe looking for unusual commercial ship names. I think the most charming yet odd ones must come from Asian roots. Here are some that I’ve found:
First 1 (It had to be first, of course.)
Maiden Voyage (Did they only sail it once?)
Mild Waltz (Maybe that’s what it feels like when going though a big storm?)
Great Mind
Great Intelligence
Family Island
Fairy Island
Dream Island (These are freighters, not Disney cruise ships!)
Morning Cloud
Inspiration Lake
Basic Pioneer
Flipper
Dodo
Stealth II (Makes me a little nervous to know it’s a chemical/oil tanker.)
Turmoil (Another oil/chemical tanker that scares me a little.)
Ever Smile
Ever Dainty (a large container ship.)
Skippin’ Sue
Power Ranger
And the now apparently defunct:
Titan Uranus.
The Royal Navy has all those beat, with ships like
HMS Cockchafer
HMS Gay Bruiser
HMS Spanker
HMS Fairy
HMS Tiptoe
etc.
Even the ones that don’t invoke memories of “rum, sodomy and the lash” are odd. Take the HMS Indefatigable. Six syllables!
“What ship did you serve on?”
“HMS In de fat a ble, the Indi fat a gable, the in da fate a ble…uh the Indy. You?”
“USS Bone Hommy Richard.”
In 1941, Admiral Kimmel was commander in chief of the U.S. naval fleet. His title was expressed in the acronym CINCUS.
After Pearl Harbor his replacement, Admiral Ernest King decided that CINCUS sounded like a bad joke and changed it to COMINCH.
True story.
A 1928 article in Radio Broadcast magazine claimed that the name of a ship that burned off the coast of Peru in 1919 was Firewood. Alas, when I did a little more research this turned out to be too good to be true–the ship was actually named Firwood.
In 1999 I was sailing with friends in the Caribbean. We moored in some bay. In the night, our skipper did a routine check, and noticed another boat moored nearby was in a very different place than an hour before – she was poorly anchored, and the wind was blowing her toward the beach, narrowly missing crashing into our boat (and others). Our skipper managed to wake up the folks on the other boat before any damage occurred.
The name of the poorly anchored boat? Sea Dragon.
(Get it? Draggin’?)