Thinking beyond the horizon
Bob Garrett is Chair of Council for the Cruising Association. He has crossed the Channel on board his Dufour 365 Intrepid many times...
Crossing the English Channel, or any busy seaway, we must avoid contention with other vessels by following the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, or 'colregs'. On a yacht if you have AIS ensure it is set to transmit that you are a 'sailing vessel' as the default setting is 'pleasure vessel'. As a yacht under sail, we find most ships take early action to avoid us and with AIS we can sometimes see their rate-of-turn flick briefly upwards. But it doesn’t always work out that way…
On one occasion, approaching the northern part of the Channel we were heading towards three ships heading west. Doing the eyeball task with multiple vessels involves many numbers, so using AIS was a good double check.
The first ship was going to be clear ahead of us, and the third clear astern. However, the second ship was the problem. Some say to obey colregs and not contact ships by VHF as confusion can arise. That would mean a turn to starboard which would take us into contention with the third ship.
Turning even more to starboard would either mean passing quite close to the third ship or gybing and heading back south-east; but first we decided to call the second ship.
A call to their MMSI number produced no response and nor did Channel 16. Positive action was needed so we commenced a starboard turn while also calling that third ship. He responded immediately, said he had heard our earlier calls to the other ship and we agreed we would pass port-to-port about half a mile from him while he also turned a little to starboard. He seemed pleased we had called him and had found an agreeable set of actions.
Immediately after, another ship called us; they were sailing westwards, we were now heading directly toward them. They were still some miles away and not visible by eye. Colregs would demand they turn to starboard to avoid us, but if we turned northwards then our courses would again converge. His question was simple and logical, “could he assume we would revert to our earlier course as soon as we could?”. We confirmed our plan to turn northwards astern of the ship; and he confirmed he would maintain his course. We were soon heading for home again.
What did we learn? That one ship failing to keep watch and observe colregs had required actions from three other vessels. We had had a clear plan that did not need VHF communications for safety but VHF conversations meant minimum disruption to shipping and to us.
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