Real Life Incident: Real Life Incident: High-Speed Impact in High Traffic Waters Leads to Vessel Sinking

In good visibility and in darkness, a chemical tanker was underway at about 13 knots with an OOW and a lookout on the bridge. For several hours, they had been navigating in waters heavily congested with fishing boats, during which time the Master was also on the bridge to make decisions where necessary. At times there were over 100 AIS targets registered on the radar’s 3-mile scale, a mixture of moving and stationary targets. By 23:00, they had cleared the dense fishing fleet, so the Master left the bridge.

At 23:19 the lookout reported what he believed to be a fishing vessel ahead and the OOW acquired it as an ARPA target on