Navigation At Night

Chelsea14Ian · May 9, 2019

41 minutes ago, EastCoastIPA said:

Mostly correct. The byelaws make NO distinction between a hire or private vessel. They state that a master of a vessel should display certain lights based upon the size of the vessel. Generally the bigger the vessel the greater the number and brighter the lights need to be. They define a master as:

"in relation to a vessel means any person whether the owner, master, hirer or other person lawfully or unlawfully having or taking command or charge or management of the vessel for the time being."

That means that anyone with the correct lights can navigate at night. It is therefore dangerous for a hire company to rely on a reference to the byelaws to forbid a hirer from navigating at night. If they bought along their own lights as they do on hired sailboats in the three rivers race, they would be within the byelaws.

The bit about the weather again applies to all masters and applies during the hours of daylight, sunrise to sunset. Lights should be used at night anyway, so the weather aspect only applies during the day.

In my opinion hiring a boat without navigation lights is very similar to hiring a rental car where the hire company has disabled the fog lights. The moment the highway code dictated you needed to turn your fog lights on you would need to pull over and stop the car to stay within the law!!!! As ever the Byelaws are very poorly written and not fit for purpose. Can you imagine a ranger, or the BA's solicitor in court trying to explain the legal definition of heavy rain? The highway code states you should use fog lights when visibility reduces to less than 100 metres which is far more quantifiable.

Again in my opinion the hire companies should fit navigation lights to all their boats to allow the hirers to comply with the need to turn them on during the day when there is restricted visibility. If they don't want their boats moving of a night time, then this should be restricted purely and simply by their own terms and conditions of hire. This should be backed up with reminders at the helm and getting the hirer to sign a document stating they understand the condition and that also they acknowledge that the hire companies insurance does not cover them to navigate at night.

Interesting what you say about lights.More then once have seen hire boats travelling at dust,no naval lights,but every light turned on in the boat.As far as I know hire boats not allowed to travel at night without nav lights.Our boat ex hire has nav lights.Fitted when she first hire in France. We have travelled at dusk but not over night.

Meantime · May 9, 2019

Was speaking to a day boat operator the other day about tracking devices which could be useful if a boat didn't return on time, or if a boat breaks down to be able to establish exactly where the boat is to send help more quickly.

The technology exists now and there is no reason why hire boat operators couldn't write it explicitly into their terms and conditions that boats are not allowed to navigate at night. This could be checked by using the trackers to see if any boat is moving after dusk. Just a thought!