Behaviour Patterns in Crossing Situations

The January 2009 issue of the Journal of Navigation included a paper (John Wilde Crosbie 2009) entitled, “Revisiting the lessons of the early steering and sailing rules for an e-navigation age.” Following a description of the development of the COLREGS from the early 19th century, he concluded that the current steering and sailing rules should be replaced by a single rule more suited to modern conditions. This might take the form of rule stating that a vessel taking action to avoid collision should not pass ahead of the other vessel. Such a rule would require a radical change in the philosophy of collision avoidance at sea, and evidence is required that it would be both effective and acceptable by mariners. Radar simulator experiments, conducted by the author some years ago, in another context, suggest that this might be the case. An analysis of the experimental results and some conclusions are reported in this paper. The author believes that further trials, specifically designed to test the Crosbie proposals, would be desirable.