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From: Arild Jensen (no email)
Date: Sun Sep 09 2001 - 11:10:21 EDT
Several people said:
"Commercial vessels often refuse to respond to my transmission on 16 or 13"
Arild comments:
Commercial vessels operating within Vessel Traffic Zones VTZ are
required to monitor the specific channel used for that particular section
of the zone.
Ch 12, 13, and 14 are all used for this purpose.
In the Great Lakes a special rule has even been fornulated that frees
commercial ships from monitoring Ch 16.
The justification being that the Coast Guard already covers the entire
region, and both American and Canadian coast Gurad stations in effect
provide duplication of coverage. They feel it is more important for the
vessels to maintain a watch on the designated VTZ channel.
Unless you check to see wwhich channel is in use, chances are you may
well be calling on the wrong channel.
And quite frankly, the amount of chit chat going on Ch 16 is enough to
make any skipper turn doen the volume.
BTW, not all commercial ships carry two radios so they can monitor more
than one channel.
SOLAS compliant radios are not the same as consumer VHF, so you cannot
be sure they have a dual watch radio.
An a final question.
The tug was described as the "stand on" vessel. Yet in a later post the
correspondent reported that finally the tug made a ninety degree turn to
avoid a collision.
Did I miss something or was the message garbled?
If the tug was indeed the stand on vessel, the recreational vessel should
have been making the course change; not the tug.
I'm not trying to make excuses for poor manners or seamanship. However,
some of the comments I see regarding commercial ships display a a total
lack of awareness as to the situation that exists on the bridge of a
commercial vessel, be it a tug or a 50,000 ton freighter. It would be a
real eye opener to take a ride on a commercial ship, especially a foreign
ship manned by a polyglot mix of nationalities. Even the officers
sometimes only speak a dialect called "seaglish". A kind of pidgin
english mixture of nautical terms, basic english and a mix of
international words from many languages.
Trying to talk to them by radio can be a very different experience.
Cheers
Arild
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