Condor ferry & Fog!

Those fast cat ferries kick up an evil wash that will literally throw you off your boat if you don't see it coming. That alone may well be a good enough reason for 6kt max in sheltered areas where small boats may be moored or pottering.
 
Capt Cautious said:
Off we go.....

Greetings Tim - that sounds good - until you consider that it could be used as the excuse in EVERY collision - thereby making other causes such as safe speed, incompetence, etc purely a byproduct of failure to keep a lookout. While I accept that "failure to keep a lookout" is a regular visitor on the maib lists - not seeing somebody does not mean that the other rules no longer apply. I don't think any rule begins "unless you've not seen him". Obviously failure to keep a lookout is a causative factor - the result of which was a domino effect of many other rules falling down. Rule 19 applied, as did all the other relevant rules - not just bits of them - you can't cherry pick.

CC
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I see what you mean, and I see how you got there from what I wrote! Perhaps I should have said "Having failed to detect the fishing boat, the watchkeepers would have seen no reason for Condor to slow down."

My point was not that closing your eyes exempts you from all the other rules (:eek:): it is that when someone breaks rule 5, it is highly likely that they will also break many of the others: i.e. they won't give way to anyone, because they won't know that there is anyone to give way to.

I confess I was disappointed that the investigation dealt with the failure to keep a look out in such woolly terms -- almost as though it were a minor bridge management issue, rather than a total breach of such a fundamental rule.
 
I have read nearly all of this long thread and am surprised more has not been said about the bridge voice log!?

It didn`t give the impression of officers focused on the task of navigating a HSC in fog.

Banter at work is fine in the right circumstances and lowers tension and allows networking but there is no place for it in the wrong setting.

Surely fog counts as that especially when the passage is about an hour and you can catch up on catwoman when the vessel is loading/unloading cars etc.

In my field, medical, banter goes on but if we were in a critical situation in the operating theatre or in my work interventional radiology I would expect and call for silence except for essential messages. Is that not what you would expect in a warship`s ops room at action stations or an aircraft during a difficult landing?

It was especially bad that a visiting captain was on the bridge, I would have wanted to set a good example.

When I have been caught out in fog in Dabchick we have silence in the wheel house and all eyes and ears on full alert.

The target was clearly visible on the radar screen shots?
 
chubby said:
The target was clearly visible on the radar screen shots?
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The Masters display was set to a very short range, showing only a mile ahead of the ferry. But the photos in the investigation report clearly show the fishing boat as a strong contact even 1 mile. Until then, it would have been out of range of the Master's radar, but the report suggests that it would probably have been visible on the Mate's display at about six miles.
 
Searush said:
Yes, I nearly got thrown off the deck of SR by the wash of teh Holyhead-Dublin fast cat. She passed the harbour entrance 20 mins earlier & I thoght no more of it. The wash arrived a 3-4 short steep waves that caught us side on (on a mooring) and rolled us gunwhale to gunwhale. Fortunately, on the deck I saw it before it hit & hung on as well as yelling a warning to swmbo below. It took while to tidy up the cabin after.
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A few years ago, I managed to get on the bridge of the Stena Explorer going to Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead. Talking to the captain on the bridge and looking at the two large radar screens, I asked at what distance he normally saw yachts - "about 8 miles if they have a reflector, others very close, some don't reflect". We were doing about 40 kts at the time and when I asked about speed in fog, the reply was "fast once clear of harbour approaches, we have a schedule to keep to". Do you use guard alarms "no because the sea state sets them off". When I asked about stopping distance at 40 kts I think the reply was "3.5 boat lengths, the bow dips 16ft and everything not tied down slides forward so we don't practice with passengers on board".

The routes of these ferries are well known to local boats and there's always radio traffic when leaving and approaching harbours. I wonder what the fisherman was doing in that location in fog.
 
lenseman said:
If the Condor ferry was traveling at 37 knots and the radar was set to 1 mile and if the watch-keeper was looking at the PPI then the ferry would only have had 83 seconds at the very most to evaluate the situation and take action to avoid a collision with the fishing boat. :(
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If you are driving a car at 40 mph you often have far less than 83 seconds to evaluate and respond to situations
 
chubby said:
If you are driving a car at 40 mph you often have far less than 83 seconds to evaluate and respond to situations
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But in a car you are not on auto pilot and you have the controls in your hands/at your feet. On the bridge it might be a 10 foot sprint once you notice the situation and put your coffee down... :eek:
 
Is it naive of me to express horror at the idea of an enormous vessel making 37 knots through dense fog, on autopilot? :eek:

With regard to the fishing boat's presence in the ferry's path, may we assume that the Frenchmen hadn't waited for fog, to fish this area? I mean, was it very unusual for any small vessel to be hereabouts?

If the location of the collision was any type of reserved channel, or customarily avoided, the Condor's use of high speed might be more reasonable - but nothing mitigates liability for inattentive watchkeeping at that speed.

Even if some halfwit decides to have a picnic in the middle of an A-road, the elementary driver's principle of observing braking distance - limiting one's speed to a rate that enables avoidance of visible hazards - still means almost any accident is the consequence of the driver's heavy right foot. However daft and infuriating cattle/madmen/drunken pedestrians in the road may be, responsible use of speed and steering can prevent the scene turning tragic.

Transposed to the sea, if radar is accepted as entirely substituting for eyesight during fog, and assuming radar displays are continuously attended, then it's still the speed of the vessel that is at fault if it doesn't allow space or time to avoid objets in its path.

I'm interested in what contributors believe might have been a non-fatal collision speed in this instance. There are hair-raising tales and footage of ships slamming yachts, even of rolling over them, and yet they may recover, remaining buoyant.

How slow might the Condor's pointy forward sections have had to go, in order for the collision to dent rather than destroy a robust steel fishing boat?
 
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There are two acid tests for the Condor speed which require no calculation.

1. A collision occurred, therefore Condor was travelling too fast.

2. Ineffective radar watch was being kept, therefore any non-zero speed was dangerous.
 
guernseyman said:
There are two acid tests for the Condor speed which require no calculation.

1. A collision occurred, therefore Condor was travelling too fast.

2. Ineffective radar watch was being kept, therefore any non-zero speed was dangerous.
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This appears to distill the appropriate regulations perfectly. It must still be remembered though that for a collision to take place 2 vessels have invariably been in breach of regs, not just one. It was not just Condor that was keeping an ineffective watch. There is always a point where both vessels MUST take action. Neither did. The report isn't exactly crystal clear on why.
CC
 
mjcp said:
But in a car you are not on auto pilot and you have the controls in your hands/at your feet. On the bridge it might be a 10 foot sprint once you notice the situation and put your coffee down... :eek:
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I don't think this is quite the case - the report describes the bridge layout - the master and chief officer are both seated with all the controls and radars to hand. One can presume that it is possible for them to get up and move around, but the report made no mention of that or even if it's permissible for them to be away from their seats by company or IMO regs. Iirc, the report didn't state which officer had the con (if they do that), but I reckon if both have the controls to hand, then it's probably safer having the autopilot on generally as it keeps the boat on a straight heading while eyes can be concentrated on looking out (visually or by radar/ais).
 
Fishing vessel location: it has already been stated on this thread (I can't be @rsed to search for which post) that the fishing boat was outside the normal channel in shallow water & for some unexplained reason the Ferry chose to go that way. So the ferry was NOT on it's normal route & the fishing boat would have thought itself safely out of the way of most inbound traffic.
 
Searush said:
. . . that the fishing boat was outside the normal channel in shallow water . . .
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Unfortunately, Searush, this does not appear to be the case. I have plotted the location of the collision as given in the report and it is 3.66 miles NNE (025T) of the SE Minquiers ECM, in about 11 meters of water. It would appear to be right in the middle of the navigable water for the ferry, which I would assume would turn more to the NE around about that point so as to avoid the rocky platform SSW of the NE Minquiers ECM. At the moment of the collision the ferry had a course made good of 14.3 (presumably T), and the potter was travelling to the SW, shooting pots.

Plomong
 
Capt Cautious said:
This appears to distill the appropriate regulations perfectly. It must still be remembered though that for a collision to take place 2 vessels have invariably been in breach of regs, not just one. It was not just Condor that was keeping an ineffective watch. There is always a point where both vessels MUST take action. Neither did. The report isn't exactly crystal clear on why.
CC
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In thick fog, radar or not, and with an 'incoming' doing 37 knots, the fishing boat had about as much chance of seeing and dodging as HMS Sheffield as the Exocet came in...
 
I think you'll probably find that both vessels had radar onboard that had a range of at least 12 miles. It's how its used that makes the difference. If the fisherman had rammed into the side of the ferry instead of being cut in half by it we'd be singing a different song. The difference would have been about 2 seconds.

CC
 
Seajet said:
In thick fog, radar or not, and with an 'incoming' doing 37 knots, the fishing boat had about as much chance of seeing and dodging as HMS Sheffield as the Exocet came in...
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Utter nonsense! Marquises drove to her eventual rendezvous with Condor, at whatever speed she was doing. If her course had been a few degrees different or she had been going a fraction of a knot slower, they would not have come together. If the master had seen the ferry on radar, he would have had many courses of action to take, but primarily could have avoided being ahead of the ferry. There were faults on both bridges/wheelhouses.
 
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