Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your position if
moving at say 22 knots. They seldom keep a good lookout at sea in my
experiences, and a small boats lights at night are only visible 2 miles
away. At 22 knots that's a pretty short time to notice a contact and
alter course for the big ship. Big ships often have their radar off
during the day too.

Let me try to clear up some serious misconceptions:

First, your "visible horizon" depends on two things: height of eye and
your atmospheric visibility. With a height of eye of 8 feet (rough
guess of your height of eye on a small yacht) your visible horizon in
clear conditions is roughly 3 miles. To calculate how far you might see
a "big ship", you'd add the distance of the horizon for the ship's
superstructure (say 9 miles for a 60 foot high ship). So in this case,
the furthest you'd be able to see this ship is roughly 12 miles, and
quite possibly alot less than that. If you don't believe me, look it up
in Bowditch.

Second, what speed ships operate at runs the gammut, but what I consider
to be the "big guys": super containerships, tankers and cruise ships,
normally run around 32-36 knots.

So best case scenario: you're sailing (at 6 knots) towards a ship
(steaming at 32 knots) that's on a reciprocal course, so you're closing
at roughtly 42 knots. So time from first visible at 12 miles to
collision is roughly 17 minutes. Remember, that's a "best case"
scenario with an "alert" lookout.

Third, it's been my experience (30+ years at sea) that almost every
merchant vessel at sea maintains a -very good- watch and lookout. There
are exceptions though, and a few particular flags (China and N. Korea
come to mind) have a reputation for not responding to hails. It's been
my experience, both as an officer in the merchant marines and a fellow
cruiser, that it's our fellow cruising community that most frequently
fails to maintain a proper lookout.

The problem for merchant ships is that small sailing vessels are just
hard to see. VERY hard to see. They usually present a poor RADAR
target and have dim or no navigation lights.

Fourth, by law all ocean going merchant ships are required to be fitted
with and operate their RADARs. If a ship has a RADAR failure, they are
required by law to head directly to port and not get underway until it's
been fixed (there's more to it than this over simplification, but I'll
spare you the details). I know of no ship's master that would risk
his/her license and livelyhood by allowing their RADARs to be secured
while operating at sea. Your comment to the contrary is complete nonsense.

On the otherhand, I'd bet at least 90% of the cruising yachts out there
(based on what I've seen) only use their RADAR in fog, and rarely in
open ocean.

Over the years I've met a great number of cruisers that:

- all hands sleep below at night, no lookouts at night;
- turn off navigation lights at night to "conserve power";
- never operate their RADAR, except near shore in fog;
- never monitor VHF hailing frequencies;
- have little or no knowledge of the Nautical Rules of the Road.

.... all very "unseamanlike" and fool-hardy practices IMHO.

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