This brand new vessel (1) was sent to the Far East for her very first container cargo. She was equipped with state of the art navigational equipment: fully integrated, ergonomically designed navigation bridge, GPS, radar integrated electronic charts, voyage event recorder and so on.
On her way back to Europe, she passed through a narrow waterway. It was reported that around 2200hrs, as the duty officer peered out into the darkness, he noticed a group of lights on his starboard side – apparently a ship leaving a small port and passing across his bows from starboard to port.
He did not believe he had time to use radar verification and ordered his vessel to hard a starboard. As she swung to starboard, the lights came across on to her port bow. The officer was expecting the ship to pass close down his port side. Before it did, however, his vessel came to a sudden stop. He had run hard aground.
Brookes Bell was called in.
The duty officer insisted that he had seen a ship crossing his bow. The voyage event recorder, however, showed no sign of one. Daylight showed that the vessel had indeed run aground (2). She had hit a small, uninhabited island. Behind it was a larger inhabited island (3).
Can you work out what might have occurred? How would you continue the investigation?
Reveal the answer here
As night fell, we noticed white lights on the larger island: one at the highest point of the island, the others slightly lower down but more or less in a line. Among them we also spotted the flicker of a red light (4).
As the darkness increased and the outline of the island disappeared, it became clear that the formation of lights increasingly resembled the lights on a ship. The red light looked more and more like a ship’s port sidelight.
The next morning we made enquiries regarding the red light. It transpired that it was a campfire on which the inhabitants of the island cooked each evening.
It is not unusual for navigating officers to be spooked by false images caused by the moon rising through clouds, or by red flares in distant oilfields being mistaken for close-range navigation lights, or, as in this case, by the lights on an island appearing to be the lights of a ship.
The young officer’s explanation seemed plausible once we had properly assessed the evidence. The incident, both serious and regrettable, was attributed to human error.