Sailing Vessels and the Collision Regulations

Extract

It is to be hoped that before the Collision Regulations are revised in any sense that affects the rights and obligations of sailing vessels, people with practical experience of navigation under sail will be consulted. It looks as though their advice will be needed.

One increasingly hears, for example, that under modern conditions steam should no longer be required to give way to sail. ‘It seems quite unreasonable now’—Captain Dickson, for instance, expresses it in the last number of the Journal (22, 448)—‘to expect in most cases that sailing vessels should be required to stand on for power-driven vessels’. But the reason a power-driven vessel is required to give way to sail is not some kind of old world courtesy, but that if there is no wind, the sailing vessel is immobilized: it cannot give way.