Look Up

With the rapid advancement in self-driving cars, it was easy to predict that self-driving boats wouldn’t be far behind. Military and commercial craft will inevitably be ahead of recreational in adopting autonomous operation, but cruising boaters will definitely be welcoming the technology aboard in the
near future.

Autonomous features are already available for boat handling. An autopilot is a form of self-piloting, especially with the ability to lock it onto a route autonomously created by a GPS. Self-docking systems have also been available for a couple of years; they control proportional thrusters and transmissions to assist in maneuvering the boat into tight places.

As sophisticated and as helpful as these tools seem, they are light years behind the technology that companies have in mind for us. One marine electronics company recently invited a group of journalists to test an auto-helm product that’s in development. A boat set out upriver, safely passing navigation aids along the way. The system then performed a 180-degree turn and returned back down the river. In the process, the boat avoided another boat that was coming head-on, all without the aid of a human steering. The system also identified and steered around a floating water bottle approximately 100 yards ahead.

This boat had nine or 10 mounted cameras to see everything. On future production boats, these cameras could be hidden in the molding and trim pieces, in the same way that parking and adaptive cruise control systems are hidden in cars today.

There’s no question that autonomous technology, including the use of AI, will be a part of boating in the future, and has the potential to improve safety. However, interesting observations are being made about how this technology could affect our behavior at the helm.

A study at Cornell University found that people navigating by GPS or a virtual assistant became “immersed more in the technology and less with the physical environment around them.” Technology has become so good at communicating with us, it is lulling us into believing we don’t have to pay as close attention to our surroundings. Simply put: What we lose is situational awareness.

Situational awareness is a guiding set of rules that professional captains and crew are taught to navigate safely, by knowing what’s going on all around. It is defined as “having a keen sense of the events and conditions around us, and the ability to apply our awareness of those events to our situation in the pre-sent and near future.”

There is good evidence that the increasing number of devices supplying information at the helm are making us less observant and more distracted. Look no further than the tragic collision involving naval vessel USS Fitzgerald. According to the U.S. Navy’s vice chief of naval operations, “the sailors who were on watch in the ship’s bridge lost situational awareness, contributing to the collision.”

Two recent situations in my own boating caused me to think about this. Whenever my wife and I are in unfamiliar waters, we call a tow boat operator in the area for local knowledge. On one call, the captain gave the following instructions: “When you get to red marker number 2, put a course line in your GPS straight to the RS junction marker. It’s about 2 miles in. Just follow that route on your GPS, and it will keep you in safe water all the way.”

A few days later, when calling for local knowledge at another location, the tow boat captain told us: “When you enter the river, as soon as you’re even with the Coast Guard station on your port side, look ahead and you will see a water tower and a church steeple. Just center the steeple under the water tower and hold that course until you come even with green marker 11, then look to your port side, and you will see the entrance channel to the marina.”

Both were good instructions that safely brought us to our destinations. The big difference was that one had us focused on a GPS screen, while the other had us looking out the pilothouse windows.

There is a place at our helms for technology, but our eyes and ears are still the most valuable tools we have. Gather information from your devices and instruments, but also practice continually observing your surroundings. Information important to monitor includes course, depth, boat traffic, weather, sea conditions and vessel data.

Engage your crew to assist, as situational awareness is a collective activity for all on board. Utilize local knowledge and crowdsourced information from boaters who have passed through ahead of you, whenever available. Apply this information to know where your boat will be in two, five or 10 minutes. As some old salts say, “Make sure you’re sailing ahead of the ship.”  

This article was originally published in the May/June 2024 issue.