Wish more people would read this. Poll is now at more than 900 takers, and 45% are still trying to find the running
lights. By the time they find them, they may find green 40'' to port of them, red 40'' to starboard, and a bow wave as high as their spreaders. At 18 knots, it shouldn''t take a ship more than about 15 minutes to come up over your visible horizon (and much less in limited visibility) and be on you. Jack makes a good point that you should try to get as much information in as quickly as possible. Looking for running
lights after or while taking a bearing can be useful. But it is dangerous to waste time trying to find running
lights first.
Perhaps many of the respondents haven''t had the opportunity to cross another vessel in the rain half way through a dark midnight watch. I''ve seen passenger liners at sea at night with strings of multicolored
lights rigged from bow to masthead to stack to stern, each lit porthole bigger than what actually turned out to be the running
lights. Perhaps while they''re looking for the right-colored
lights in their "proper" places, these sailors will recall the tanker off the East Coast that was advised by the Coast Guard that they had what looked to be a dead 40 ton whale caught on their bow. No one on the ship had felt them hit anything.