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Guest
Guest
A Polish boat was run down off the North Sea coast of Denmark last year and from the sole survivors account it would seem that perception, on the part of the yacht crew, was the main cause.(excluding anything done or not done by the big ship). In many ways the eye is a rather poor optical instrument and much of our sense of vision relies on the brain. We have to learn to see. On the whole we see what we expect to see or, even more dangerous, we see what we want to see. Even if this is nothing. Insurance companies are full of stories of people hitting things that weren't there until hit. In the case of the Polish survivor she said that they had seen the ship but thought from it's lights that it was going away from them, it was only in the seconds before the impact that she realized it was coming towards them. from my own experience I know how difficult it can be "reading" fishing boats at night and trying to decide exactly what they're doing and which direction they're going in, even whether they're small and close or larger and further away. And I've had the same problems in day with "unusual" shaped ships. One of the problems with perception is that we are completely convinced by the brain that we KNOW when in fact we don't know at all. Trying to retain a doubt about what you're "seeing" at all times is very difficult but perhaps it's absolutely necessary.
