Mauritius to South Africa Day Ten - 28 07.002S 038 01.043E
Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Sun 10 Nov 2013 16:27
All the talk of calling up ships over recent days, one ship yesterday evening called us up - the first as far as we can remember that's done that. AIS showed he would pass about 4 miles from us so we didn't call him up, but he called us as he was interested to know what sailing a yacht across the ocean was like. So we chatted for a while, giving him details of the trip and answering his questions. Perhaps we have a budding yachtie in the making! They say assumptions are dangerous things and that was shown to be true again with another ship encounter. This one was going to pass about 2 miles from us and his course looked perfectly chosen to do that. We followed his course for a couple of hours and it didn't waver. With about 12 miles to go before we would meet I called just to make sure he had seen us and his course was due to us being there. It wasn't. He hadn't seen us on AIS or radar and his course was just a coincidence! Eventually he did find us on his radar and AIS and we agreed that no change in course was necessary. Never rely on assumptions in close encounters with big ships!
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