Wayne.B wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/3ymzod

A sad story.

I'had a similar experience about twenty years ago sailing across the
north sea towards England. At around 2am it was my turn to take over the
watch. The buddy before was still busy writing the log at the chart
table and we caught a 'securite - securite - securite' message. He got
****ed of us leaning over the table to hear better and turned the radio
off !
Some hours later, trying to identify each oil rig with the chart, there
was one we could not identify and its position was funny anyway. There
were a couple of motor boats close to it, lit up like a Christmas tree.
We only realized when we were close that we were attempting to cross the
path of a towed oil rig. We would have made it in front of the first
tug, to be nicely tucked away leeward between two tugs and their
cables... The tug closest to use did turn on a search light illuminating
us nicely as we were tacking away and hailed us on the radio.

Interpreting lights at night is not easy, we had about 20 knots of wind
on a 39-footer and were attentive to whats going on. Despite this we
were late in our maneuver.

Markus