AIS

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Admittedly most turned out to be at anchor.
 
The bay of Gibraltar was stressful, as it was blowing 30 knots and due to multiple harbours on three sides of the bay, traffic was cris-crossing a lot. Tanker going parallel with us decided to go left when we wanted to turn right, pilot boats zipping around, ferries of all speeds and sizes and refueling tankers out of Gib maneuvering to raft up with ships. Here's a screenshot from after we've safely docked:

gibais.png


And one at anchor at Ria de Vigo, with long AIS tracks enabled - interesting to see local traffic patterns. No stress here :)

busyais.png
 
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All this thread is doing is reassuring me I made the right decision not to have AIS anywhere near my boat......
 
All this thread is doing is reassuring me I made the right decision not to have AIS anywhere near my boat......

Dont worry AIS is great and very easy to use with modern sets. Its just that people forget that not every boat has it and forget to look out properly. Anything big is not a problem, its the small fishing boats etc that you have to watch for. Without AIS you are doing that already, its just doing it with AIS fitted that gives bad hair days.
 
All this thread is doing is reassuring me I made the right decision not to have AIS anywhere near my boat......

My co skipper finds it very useful especially on night sails , I still tend to do it the old fashion way and eye ball them and use a stanchion or what ever handy at the time to line them up ,
not sure when it was the last time I used an HBC on a ship .
AIS or not you still got to keep a watch on what's going on .
It's a aid like most stuff. Some like it others don't .
 
You can buy really cheap little boxes that tell you where it is and if it's going to get anywhere near your boat, really handy! :)

But I can tell that by looking at it..... I guess if you worry about all those ships out there possibly running you down it's useful as a reassurance tool, if you don't worry about it then it's not really necessary is it. As others have pointed out it doesn't remove the need to keep a lookout, or even the need to be able to assess angles and closing speeds, although I concede it might make it easier some of the time. I imagine it would be really useful in fog or seriously reduced visibility, but again it's not going to identify everything out there so it can't be relied upon. I do wonder if sailing is going to go the same way as driving where the proliferation of electronic gizmos has effectively dumbed drivers down to a really basic level.
 
The bay of Gibraltar was stressful, as it was blowing 30 knots and due to multiple harbours on three sides of the bay, traffic was cris-crossing a lot. Tanker going parallel with us decided to go left when we wanted to turn right, pilot boats zipping around, ferries of all speeds and sizes and refueling tankers out of Gib maneuvering to raft up with ships. Here's a screenshot from after we've safely docked:

gibais.png


And one at anchor at Ria de Vigo, with long AIS tracks enabled - interesting to see local traffic patterns. No stress here :)

busyais.png

Do the green triangles with black circles mean an anchored vessel?
If so, a really nice graphic, wish Garmin had this.
 
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