Originally Posted by
Bing
Brisk does have that advantage that you are definitely the over taking vessel, which should make it clear who's responsible for collision avoidance. Obviously that didn't work in this case, but I've been on a T42 through the Dover Straits and the Captain had us doing 18kts to make life simple.
Overtaking case understood, and of course in the Dover Strait there are 'traffic lanes' to facilitate proceedings. But in this case we are talking about a head-on collision!
Thanks to the wonders of Google Earth, I've found broadly where the collision occurred. Searching for "Stura, Norway" will put you in the ball-park, and you can then easily correlate with the tracking info at
https://medium.com/@cargun/radar-ima...n-a71e3f516b54
At this point the fjord is about 3 miles wide, about 10 miles in from the open sea, and with some 25 miles to run to Bergen itself. Annoyingly I can't find a chart of Hjeltefjord which might show shipping lanes or shoal water, but it seems that KNM Helge Ingstad is 'hugging the coast line' in such a way that there's little or no manoeuvring room to starboard ... leaving at least 2 miles of open water to port [depth unknown to me]. OTOH, why was the Sola TS running so close to shore on her way out, thus to an extent preventing an oncoming vessel from passing 'port to port'? Whichever, was it wise, in that scenario, for Helge Ingstad to be forging ahead at 17.4 its in the dark?
The scenario reminds me of the
Halifax Explosion in 1917, in confined waters, where a combination of 'excessive speed' and a lack of manoeuvring room led to a collision and, subsequently, a massive explosion ("
The blast was the largest man-made explosion before the development of nuclear weapons, releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT").