As a marine pilot and a small boat owner, I am a keen observer of how other small boat owners operate. I am impressed with the seamanship of boat owners in Gladstone, and while I have seen a few amazing feats of bad seamanship, these have involved sailing boats and commercial boats.
Gladstone harbour is increasingly being taken over by commercial shipping with more wharves and increased shipping. Ships are constrained by their draft to using designated channels, and local small craft, mindful of this, generally stay out of the channels, or leave the channel when a ship is approaching.
What some small boat owners don’t appreciate, is the high speeds that ships travel at in the harbour. A ship in ballast inwards to Fishermans Landing, may maintain "sea speed" of 15 knots as far as Clinton wharf, and a loaded Cape size ship with 150,000 tonnes of coal on board and 17 metres draft, can make 10 to 12 knots through the water.
For a ship to avoid a small craft in an emergency, the time taken to stop the ship from 11 or 12 knots is in the order of 10 minutes, and stopping distance is 0.75 to 1.1 miles, depending on draft and water depth. To turn a ship through 90 degrees will take 3 minutes and the ship will cover 0.4 miles, putting it out of the channel, and most probably aground. These times and distances assume water depth greater than twice the ship’s draft. Typically a ship in ballast will draw 7 to 10 metres with UKC (under keel clearance) of 7 or 8 metres: a loaded Cape size ship will draw 16 to 18 metres with UKC of 1.5 to 1.8 metres. This means that emergency response, particularly for a loaded ship, is unpredictable, and nigh impossible.
Small boats are often not easily seen from the ship’s bridge. On 9th February 2000, in good weather at 0935 hours, a 105,000 tonne tanker ran over a 4.5 metre runabout with two people on board off the NSW coast. No one on the ship saw the runabout, and the two men on the runabout, intent on fishing, didn’t see or hear the ship until it was too late.
Particularly hard to see are outrigger canoes, and I had a close call with one off G1 buoy recently. The conditions were daylight and good visibility. I did not see it until it popped out on my port bow having crossed the ship in the "blind sector."
Small boats will often have difficulty seeing ships at night as the steaming lights are very high and spaced at large distances. Often the best indication of the presence of a ship is the disappearance of the shore lights. There have been instances where small boat operators have confused the lights of a very large ship and tried to go between them, thinking that there were two ships, not one. A famous case of this is the collision between a navy patrol boat and a laden bauxite ship in the Whitsundays.
On the subject of lights - masthead tri tights, popular on yachts, are hated by pilots as they give no visual indication of distance off. Side lights at deck or cabin level, give a better indication of size and distance off.

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