Coping With Fog

Dealing With One of the Most Dangerous Elements of Seamanship.

- Dag Pike

We were just a few hours out of London, in the notorious Dover Straits on my first trip to sea at the age of 16, when we collided with another ship in thick fog. It was only a glancing blow so we were able to carry on with our voyage, but it was a lesson about the dangers of fog. At sea, things can happen unexpectedly, and you realize just how your world changes when visibility drops to zero.

That was before the days of electronics. We had no radar, no GPS, and no AIS, so it was a bit like navigating with a stick and we had to rely on listening and locating fog signals. Modern electronics have made a huge difference to navigating in these conditions. They give you confidence to keep going when you can’t see ahead, and you tend to rely on them totally, which is where the danger lies. GPS positioning on the chart plotter can give you a lot of confidence that you know where you are, but radar and AIS have their limitations when it comes to collision avoidance in fog, and cannot be trusted implicitly to detect everything that is around you.

TRUST YOUR SENSES

With two displays in the pilothouse—one showing the radar and one the electronic chart—you are likely to be focussing on these screens rather than looking out of the windows. In theory, these two displays show you everything you need to know, so why bother with keeping a visual lookout? The problem is that you cannot be sure that the radar will show everything that is moving on the water, particularly if there is a sea running. That is when the radar will pick up the returns from the waves as well as those from small boats and the small-boat returns can get lost in the sea clutter.