200126 Fishing Vessels in TSS

Fishing Vessels in TSS
Report No. 200126

I am writing to you as a Chief Mate of a general cargo ship which frequently transits the English Channel. Every time I make a transit I am amazed by the number of Mates and Captains who forget to report to Gris-Nez Traffic or Dover Coastguard at the appointed reporting positions. They get reprimanded by the radio operators and must promise never to do this again, and they shouldn't!

But this is not my concern.

The fact is that the respective coastguards can oversee the entire Dover Strait and are seemingly unaware of the large amounts of fishing vessels travelling in the opposite direction of the traffic separation scheme.

When a merchant ship doesn't report in at the correct place at the start of the TSS they send an aeroplane to identify the vessel. This doesn't happen with the hundreds of fishing vessels every week that sail against the flow of traffic and cause alarming and dangerous situations.

A good example is the situation which occurred recently on my watch. A fishing vessel steering a westerly course in the eastbound traffic lane made life really unpleasant for several large vessels, including a VLCC, because the vessel was also expecting to have the right of way. To make matters worse, she also had the nerve to show three red lights on her mast (it was a 25 meters fishing vessel).

Why do the respective authorities not do anything about it? Do we have to wait until an accident happens? When it happens, will we find a way to blame the merchant vessel and not the local fisherman?

I sincerely hope, that this report will open the eyes of the radar operators on both sides of the channel, but I expect that no one will even care.