The COLREGs
Book Extract
A friend who joined the Royal Navy with me once explained why he had turned his back on a lucrative career as a criminal barrister, and chosen a life at sea. “Because”, he said, “the sea is the last hiding place of the incurable romantic.”
He was right. The sea is the last great wilderness, wide open and untamed. A lot of people, amateurs and professionals alike, go to sea because it is lonely, wild and exciting. When you get out of sight of the land, you realise just how vast it is. The great majority of the oceans are outside territorial waters, and you might well think that you could get by without rules of any kind, simply because there is so much sea and so few ships. Besides, who on earth has the authority to enforce the rules?
In a nutshell, we need the rules because we are all creatures of habit. Commercial shipping tends to stick in unmarked marine motorways called the shipping lanes, precisely because they are the shortest distance between two points. Fishing vessels quite often work in groups, and yachtsmen are little better. In the past, if your dead reckoning was like mine, you spent half of a Channel crossing trying to decide whether that bit of land over there was France or Alderney. Even when navigating warships there were periods when I was less certain of my precise position than I might have wished. But now navigation is so precise, and the routes from A to B so well defined, that shipping is more concentrated than ever before.
Most shipping is crammed into a tiny proportion of the earth’s oceans, and in a number of areas you can find merchant ships, fishing vessels, yachts and other vessels existing happily alongside each other, all pursuing their separate agendas. The Rules set out the context in which the remarkable diversity of maritime activity can safely use the same stretch of water. Over the last 150 years, seamen have gradually developed a code of rules which has become widely accepted and fits easily alongside ‘the ordinary practice of seamen’.
The Collision Regulations that we currently use are the result of this process. In their present form, they date back to 1972, with the addition of various amendments designed to take account of developments in the way we use the sea. They are administered by the International Maritime Organisation. The IMO was set up by the United Nations in 1948 to promote safety at sea, and is committed to regulating the international maritime community. At the time of writing there are now 173 member states of the IMO, and it is because so many nations have signed up to the Rules that they enjoy such wide-ranging authority.
You do need to refresh your familiarity with the Rules occasionally, because they develop gently with time. If, like me, you have been going to sea since the time when Noah was taking carpentry lessons, you may still think that ‘safe speed’ means stopping in half of your visibility distance. And if you remember learning that in a close-quarters situation the two vessels are either ‘burdened’ or ‘privileged’, it is time for you to have another look at the Rules – they have changed!
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Learn The Nautical Rules Of The Road is written by Paul Boissier. Paul Boissier has spent much of his professional career working on the sea, or in support of the people who go to sea, and in his leisure time he is an avid yachtsman. In the Navy he commanded and navigated warships and submarines in many parts of the world, ending his career as a senior Admiral. He then spent 10 years as Chief Executive of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the charity that saves lives at sea and operates over 340 lifeboats around the UK and Republic of Ireland. This lifetime’s experience has given him a unique perspective on navigation, from the bridge of a warship, to the cockpit of a cruising yacht and the control room of a submarine.