The Collision Regulations appear to have been at the top of the agenda this year, with Julian Parker making it the main topic of his farewell speech at the AGM.

Roger Syms flew all the way from Van Diemen’s Land to present his paper at the Command Seminar. This, and the results of his Colregs survey, showed us all the error of our ways and revealed that most of us are doing the wrong thing at one time or another.

I met Roger a week before the seminar and over lunch we discussed, and solved, most of the world’s problems relating to the application of the Colregs and navigation generally. We agreed that a lot of it boiled down to crew resource management: how to talk to, manage and get the desired response, performance and feedback from your bridge team. If you can achieve this air of easy familiarity with your bridge team, where all information flows both ways, then you can manage just about anything.

I only have a few basic principles when it comes to traffic management: keep your ship safe and if you are not comfortable with the situation someone else is forcing you into, then get out of it. Always do it early, and always assume that the other ship will never alter course for you.

Not a day goes past that I don’t hear the plaintive cry of, ‘ship on my port/starboard bow distance two/three miles with CPA 2 cables, what is your intention?’ If you have got yourself into a situation that results in a distracting last minute panic call on the VHF, you should have done something about it a long time ago; and never mind that you were the stand-on vessel.

I teach and demonstrate by example. That end-on or nearly end-on ship that has just popped up on the radar and is showing a CPA of less than a mile? Give him ten degrees to starboard now and within minutes his CPA will have increased to two miles. By the time you get a good look at him, he will be four points on your port bow.

That ship on your port side, crossing ahead with a CPA of less than two miles? Don’t like that one either, Arpa is not that accurate and he might do something really stupid at the last moment. Still no alteration or action at four or five miles? Time to get out, with a broad alteration to starboard. Run away from him and show him your port quarter and force him to take your stern, which is where he should have been in the first place.

In the 13 years since I came back to sea, I have heard numerous horror stories from Filipino and Egyptian officers about masters who shouted at them for altering course or straying more than a pencil line width from the course line. What nonsense. No wonder that so many of them stand transfixed and mesmerised in front of the radar, hoping and praying that the other ship will get out of the way.

Beating them with a stick will only produce non-speaking robots. Teach them with humour how to do the right thing; and applaud them when they do.