Tag: preventing collisions at sea

The current fishing ban in China, issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, will be lifted in South China Sea from 16 August 2018, the UK Club said citing information by Huatai.  Following this, the waters of East China Sea, Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea will see the ban lifted in September.

A Japanese research partnership, comprising Japanese shipping company MOL, MOL Techno-Trade, National Institute of Maritime, Port and Aviation Technology, and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology (TUMSAT), aims at developing an advanced navigation support system. 

In the short educational video in cooperation with Standard P&I Club, CHIRP Maritime analyzes a very good example of non compliance with collision avoidance regulations. CHIRP comments that, in open waters, there is absolutely no need for vessels to be in close proximity to one another.

The West of England Club continues to see collisions between vessels underway and at anchor in Chittagong anchorage area, with 50 such incidents recorded since 2013. The considerable increase of ships calling at Chittagong has brought a respective increase of incidents, which has attracted the attention of marine insurance industry in recent years.

The Nigbo Maritime Safety Administration, China, issued guidance for fishing vessels to navigate safely in the coastal waters of Ningbo-Zhoushan Port. It is noted that there are about 5000 fishing boats along the coast of Ningbo every day, and heavy fog is frequent in the area. 

UK-based autonomous systems provider ASV Global is leading a new £1.2 million research project in partnership with compatriot BMT to enhance safety and reliability of autonomous navigation, through the use of deep learning machine vision systems trained with simulated and real-world data.

A bulk carrier was sailing at night in coastal waters when it spotted a fishing vessel, whose navigation and signal lights were indistinct. The bulk carrier changed his course and alerted the fishing vessel's crew. However, the fishing vessel changed its course as well. As a result the two ships collided.

Rolls-Royce's MAXCMAS research project found that the use of newly developed algorithms allowed existing COLREGs to remain relevant in a crewless environment, and that Artificial Intelligence-based navigation systems can comply with the rules to avoid collision effectively, even when approaching manned vessels were interpreting the rules differently.

The new scenario on the Surface Warfare Officer School bridge simulator takes radar data, ship tracks and other open source information and recreates for SWOS students the experience of being on the bridge of the destroyer when it collided with ACX Crystal.

Taking consideration of various court claims involving maritime casualties, Harry Hirst of Ince&Co. law firm discussed the importance of "the use of time" by duty officers in collision avoidance. Namely, in the latest edition of Signals Newsletter, Mr. Hirst notes distance is often a criteria that OOWs apply when taking action, however avoiding action should always be about timing and not about distance.