Or, in simpler terms, "play nice".
No, this North Channel in the Solent. Not much water either side when you draw 2.5m and it's LW springs.
Just ribbing you for being presumptuous in assuming everybody would know your were referring to the Solent.
Gey few, an they're a deid
Not necessarily, a weaving motorboat in a river / channel, when there are many sailing boats, puts it's self in the way of many more standon boats than if it stuck to one side of the river.
That's an entirely different situation to "Colregs exist for a reason, you're tacking across the channel, i give way, you stand on, we both know who's going to do what because we are following the rules."
We are capable of travelling at the required speeds on the rivers we travel on. In the incident i mentioned earlier on the Deben, we were doing just over 4 knots, the idiot in the dinghy was proclaiming we shouldn't be doing any more than 5 knots, although the speed limit on that stretch of water is 8 knots. Some dinghy racers think Colregs don't apply to them and they just make things up.
to indicate my intended turn as I approached the bank, or a motorboat on a previously predictable path! (Perhaps sailing boats should be fitted with indicators?)
Overtaking a tacking yacht is just a simple matter of geometry in most cases. As overtaking boat you merely aim to pass astern of the sailing boat just after it tacks, close to the side of the channel. You then have two of the yacht’s boards’ time to get well past, whereas if you use the centre of the channel you only have half the time. Not hard to understand.It's remarkable that slowing or stopping (or even speeding up) is the last thing many boaters, especially motor-boaters but those under sail too, think of when trying to avoid other craft.
Long ago I used to race a dinghy in a narrow river with motorboats passing up and down (thankfully neither the size not frequency of those in the Broads), some of whom would be zig-zagging wildly down the river at a constant speed, aiming for the gap behind a sailing dinghy that still had two or three tacks across the river to do before they'd be in close proximity. Typically they still hadn't comprehended the regular pattern of the tacking dinghy's movements, nor the relative paths and speeds of the two boats, and would be making ever sharper turns, perhaps even ending up at almost right angles to the river.
I used to often give hand signals
Avoiding motorboats that were trundling up or down the river, or sometimes seemingly determined to run dinghies down, would often affect the relative positions of the dinghies racing, but fortunately for me it was a friendly family-orientated sort of club (serious racers would be deterred by that sort of hazard and the very restricted waters and go elsewhere) and most weren't too bothered by that. (There were inevitably a few who took it far too seriously - a couple of testosterone-fuelled teenagers, and an older chap who I suspected had some sort of mental issue about it - and get aerated about such setbacks. They were also the ones who would brazenly cheat to gain places, which seemed completely pointless to me.)
the challenge can be more complex when there are multiple sailing boats in a channel all beating, especially when it is not your specialism
Like in the Walton Channel you mean perhaps?
Former Merchant mariner here. Very well said sir, I did indeed do the same as our speeds are much higher compared to leisure boats and our manoeuvrability is a bit lower making time and distance your friend. So in open water I make sure to stick to the rules as a leisure sailor now. However when encountering professional traffic near Rotterdam, Flushing, IJmuiden I make sure to stay well out of their way outside the bouyed channels if water depth allows. Traffic Control is very helpful in guiding you through these traffic situations.
Sailing vessels never have "the right of way" perhaps your belief that you do is what causes you issues ?Bear in mind that while a vessel under sail does not have the right of way in every circumstance, it does always have moral superiority.
Although perfectly true, I'll presume to answer for Little Sister; that many of us have the, perhaps ill-advised, habit of using 'right of way' as a shorthand for the more awkward 'stand-on vessel' which usually involves rearranging the sentence. I try to avoid it in the forum but I confess that I often use it mentally while knowing it to be inaccurate. I do the same thing with 'derestricted' on the roads in place of 'national speed limit' which doesn't come to mind as readily.
I think there is a moral if not legal responsibility for skippers of fast or unusually fast boats to keep out of the way. A slower boat may not have the ability to manoeuvre adequately, and assessment of a fast vessel without radar or AIS can be very hard, often in limited time.
