Deep question

[Black Panther 1,581]

Imagine if you will a boat sailing merrily across the ocean. The solo crew asleep down below.

Is the probability of collision with another vessel related to the speed the boat is traveling?

[Mothership 6]

Too hard to answer. 

 

In this situation, a large factor is whether the other boat has electronics or humans looking for you. 

[waikiore 398]

More the size of the boat sailing itself ie visual/radar target I would have thought

[Fish 0]

No.

There are substantially greater factors influencing the probability of a collision than boat speed.

 

Main factors:

1) on a shipping lane / likelihood of encountering other shipping

2) have radar or AIS alarms 

 

Note, I am focusing the quantifying the probability. Not if it is a good idea or not.

And if boat speed did influence the probability in a mathematical sense, it would be a very minor factor in relation to the above two points.

[Clipper 343]

A faster boat spends less time at sea, so surely if all else was random it would have less chance of being hit

[Jon 360]

I'm with Clipper on this one

[Bogan 8]

I agree with the last answer. The collision/time doesn't vary by speed, but the collision/journey does.

 

Think of the extreme case: a boat that bobs around forever will eventually be hit.

[John B 106]

I don't the answer in probabilty/ statistical terms , but you have more time to react between oh sh*t and collision if you're slower.

 A bit like when Sundreamer appears out nowhere despite being big and pink and you go thank ^%$# he knows what he's doing.

[Island Time 1,226]

agree. Speed has little to do with it except it makes a collision potentially worse, the likelyhood is the same - you still take up the same amount of ocean, fast or slow!

Now, using common waypoints and known shipping lanes - that is another topic altogether...

[tuffyluffy 76]

I'm with Clipper as well.

[Romany 162]

I've thought long and hard about this. Now I have a migraine so I am going with Maybe/Maybe not. If it was more likely and they did per chance

collide, and both vessels sank or erupted into an enormous ball of fire with both crews going to their peril, who would know. In which case did it

ever happen.

[Fish 0]

A boat going faster still has to cover the same amount of miles to reach the destination.

 

If the risk of a collision is based on the probability of hitting an object on your path, per mile, then speed will have no influence.

 

If you then consider the risk of an object being on your path, and you consider that ships are big objects and move a lot, then the likelihood of a ship crossing your path is higher the slower you go. Being that the longer you are at sea, the higher the likelihood is of a ship crossing your path.

 

I don't believe doubling your speed (halving journey time) is going to have an appreciable reduction in risk of a collision. I do agree that if a boat is just stationary, then over a very long time there is a high likelihood of being hit by something, but that is a journey time trending to infinity, i.e. not realistic.

 

I maintain that by far the greatest influence of risk of a collision is choice of route and use of radar, AIS.

 

By example, if you fang it down the English Channel with your eyes shut at 40 knots, you will hit something.

If you cruise down the English Channel at 4 knots with your eyes shut, with radar and AIS screaming you location like a banshee, all the shipping will go around you. In that context, the speed is not the influencing factor, but the use of radar / AIS etc.

 

Having spent several season racing across the English Channel, I know for a fact its not how fast you cross it, its how good you are at spotting and dodging stuff. In eh sleeping single hander context, that is where the radar . AIS alarms come into it.

[SloopJohnB 323]

A faster boat spends less time at sea, so surely if all else was random it would have less chance of being hit

Can this apply to the roads????

[twisty 176]

If this is theoretical, I would assume there is no difference. It's the same argument about whether you get wetter if you run in the rain. On one hand you spend less time on the water but on the other you cover more ground over that time meaning you are at more risk. One cancels out the other.

[erice 732]

Imagine if you will a boat sailing merrily across the ocean. The solo crew asleep down below.

Is the probability of collision with another vessel related to the speed the boat is traveling?

 

similar to the joke about speeding through red lights

 

the faster you go

 

the less time you're in the danger zone

 

which is obviously wrong

 

as it only deals with 1 variable

[Deep Purple 511]

 

 A bit like when Sundreamer appears out nowhere despite being big and pink and you go thank ^%$# he knows what he's doing.

 

Meanwhile on Sundreamer....... "sh*t that was close, he must have known what he was doing....."

 

Clipper has it right, the least time you spend at sea, the less chance of anything going wrong

[Addem 94]

Myth busters proved that if you run in the rain you get more wet than if you walk. Ergo, absent of AIS and English Channel situations if you go slow you will hit less things. Pure science right there.

[twisty 176]

At the risk of contradicting myself. Doesn't the rain thing work because if you are running, the angle of the rain effectively changes from coming straight down to more of an angle, hence more surface area. On that basis my analogy with the rain is wrong. However I am not convinced I am wrong with the speed versus time argument.

[erice 732]

as far as i can see

 

the smallest chance of collisions every time the skipper slept

 

would be to be stopped

 

debris and islands would be moving very slowly, if at all, while the boat was stopped

 

and other fast moving ships would have more time to see and avoid a stopped boat

 

conversely

 

a fast moving vessel with no watch

 

has increased chance of smacking debris like containers

 

increased chance of hitting islands and reefs

 

and less time to be seen, evaded by a vessel on a collision course

 

qed

 

with no watch, the slower the boat goes the smaller the risk and of course greatly reduced amount of damage if there is a hit

 

on a schooner like BP

 

that might mean always dropping the main at night

 

which is pretty much what slocum did with his yawl

[wheels 543]

If you start thinking on some other deeper aspects of this, it is fascinating to think that two objects could travel a great distance and then collide somewhere. That if just one object hesitated or had no hesitation over the distance of it's journey, the collision would never happen. Even on the Road, many collisions may never have occurred if a split second of difference happened some where. We call them freak accidents.