Learning from mistakes is vital for preventing casualties and mariners have much to gain from studying the judgements of court cases, which contain valuable lessons for the future. But to what extend is it practical for mariners to read such court documents?
A new book, entitled “Collisions at Sea: Volume 1: Liability and the Collision Regulations”, comes to extend maritime knowledge from the practical implementation of navigational rules to the actual lessons gained from court cases involving collisions at sea.
Written by Capt. Harry Hirst, a Master Mariner and leading Admiralty lawyer, “Collisions at Sea” comes to simplify and reduce the time for both mariners and maritime lawyers in interpreting the regulatory approach of court rulings in regard to ship collisions.
There have been almost 40 years since the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) entered into force by the IMO, setting out navigation rules to be followed by ships and other vessels at sea in order to prevent collisions. And despite all the technological advancements that act as useful tools for safe navigation, collisions at sea are still an area of concern for maritime safety.
As such, understanding how the courts interpret Collision Regulations is a critical step for resolving liability challenges and gain valuable feedback for future best practices. Collision cases are very fact sensitive, but constitute, at the same time, a useful source for lawyers to cite from previous court judgements to support their arguments.
In this way, the book becomes a useful reading addressed at both mariners, who have to face real-time navigational challenges, and marine lawyers, who still have to settle liability for ships’ collisions, as well as at maritime casualty investigators and all those involved in teaching the rules.
Providing dedicated chapters on manoeuvring rules, restricted visibility, narrow channels, Traffic Separation Schemes, the author shares knowledge, not only on the rules themselves, but also on the court interpretation of these rules, seeking to fill the gap in the literary market of books dealing with collisions at sea.
My objective in writing this book was to help mariners understand not just what the Rules say, but also how the Rules are to be interpreted. Many key words in the Rules are not defined, such as “risk of collision” and “a close quarters situation”. The reported cases contain some helpful comments on how judges interpret these and other words in the Rules, and in this book I have reproduced and organised these comments in a format which, I hope, achieves this objective.
-Capt. Harry Hirst
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