... why I should have paid attention in geometry class
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Originally Posted by Mee-n-Mac
...which leads my to ask if everyone knows how to tell when you're on a collision course. Perhaps there are some boating newbies that haven't learned that yet ??
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Originally Posted by Misty Blue
A collision course is defined (at least in my books) as a vessel on a steady ralative bearing with a decreasing range.
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And you and Skip get the prize. Should anyone else not know, if the angle from your boat (relative bearing) to another holds steady (zero rate) and the distance is getting smaller then you're on a collision course. Same thing used to be taught to car drivers so they could tell if they were going to hit a car coming on/off the ramp. The reason why this is true is best explained by a picture of a triangle within a triangle. No doubt such a picture is available on the WWW someplace.
Along the lines of what SD asked back up in this thread: I hope we've all been ingrained that when 2 boats are more or less running in opposite directions that each should pass to the other's port side*. Now I ask if the other boat is just slightly to your starboard side, and you recognize this way in advance, do you turn to starboard to allow a port-to-port pass? At what lateral separation do you decide the proper pass is starboard-to-starboard ?
*I could only hope that someday PPP (Port Pass Prefered) would become as widely known as Red-Right-Return. Everyone has heard of RRR even if they don't know what it means.