Reflecting on small craft visibility
Posted on | March 29, 2010 | No Comments
Small craft share the same sea as huge ships, but don’t always come off too well when they get too close. There have been too many running down incidents, and not always because the small craft skippers are neglecting to keep a lookout because they have been making assumptions about “steam always giving way to sail”, or helping the crew gut the fish they have caught.
Small craft don’t help themselves, because their lights are weak, their radar reflectors worse than useless and a wooden or grp structure just doesn’t set off guard ring alarms on radars and gets lost in the sea clutter. So people die, or are scared witless, and those aboard the big ships, not always blessed with the best visibility over their cluttered foredecks, don’t even notice the bump.
Last week, at the 17th conference of the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities in Cape Town, a whole session was devoted to marine accidents and near misses, with “small craft conspicuity” seen as an important issue in its own right.
Passive radar reflectors, which small craft owners faithfully hoist up their halyards in an act of faith before leaving port do nothing other than make a boat look untidy, and even active reflectors, which give a bleep from time to time, are really only detectable on X-band radars. Unless you can physically keep small craft and big ships apart, which seems unlikely, accidents will continue to happen.
But because this was the IALA Conference , there are, it seems a lot of technical solutions which lighthouse authorities have already discovered, and which really could save lives. People who have the task of designing navigational buoys know a lot about conspicuity, and get a trifle annoyed when their buoys are run down by ships where the watchkeepers cannot be bothered to look out of the window.
You could, for instance, produce some better lights and much more effective radar reflectors, incorporating dihedrals, like you will see on a buoy, or even integrate dipoles into the structure of the yacht or fishing boat as it is built. Better still, why not incorporate chaff , the metallic foil used to confuse incoming missiles, into the grp hull or superstructure of a boat. Showing a radar echo is what chaff is designed for and it could be both cheap and effective. Then, in extremis, with a large ship bearing down on your craft, you could fire a rocket, while strobe lights, as favoured by emergency vehicles could jog the big ship’s watchkeeper out of his torpor.
But let’s face it, if people in big ships were not blasting around in crowded waters at 25 knots, often in nil visibility, that would, it was inferred, help a great deal too. A little more energetic monitoring of these speed merchants, now AIS helps coastal stations identify them, followed by some brisk prosecutions of the owners, forcing masters to keep to unrealistic schedules, might encourage them to reflect on their sins.
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