A real life experience from Michael Smith Sunday 15 February 2009 Late last August, I I installed the Sea-me and the Nasa AIS on my Rival 34 at the start of the 2006 season, just before I left Plymouth for the Baltic, and I removed an old Raytheon radar at the same time. The radar set was obsolete and becoming unreliable, never mind my limited competence with it. I took the view that, now that GPS was reliably accurate, radar was no longer important for navigation and my main requirement was for collision avoidance with other vessels. Sea-me makes me more visible to others and AIS provides position information on the size of vessels that pose the most risk - though I acknowledge that it does nothing to help in the case of a number of small craft converging on the same waypoint in fog. My own experience has confirmed the technical reports that I have read and I am confident that Sea-me makes a valuable contribution to my safety at sea. I was heading north single-handed from Estonia to Finland in a F5-6 WSW-ly; visibility was extremely poor in continuous heavy rain and the motion of the yacht, with short and steep seas on the quarter, did not aid a consistent lookout although my windvane was steering effectively and leaving me free to concentrate. The AIS picked up a ship heading west and, at eight miles distant, indicated a close approach. I watched it carefully and, at three miles, could see a serious risk of collision, so I radioed the ship, gave my course and relative position, and asked if it had seen me and whether it agreed that we were heading for a very close approach. The reply was that he had seen me by radar but not visually - and when he heard that I was a 10m yacht, he commented that I was making a big echo for a small boat! He then altered course to pass astern of me. This was my first real practical confirmation that the Sea-me works and I continue to be happy to have it on board. I find the stand-alone Nasa AIS receiver, which gives an instant indication of collision risk with no expertise required from the user, invaluable. The two units together give me much more comfort than the combination of my Firdell reflector and the radar ever did. The cost of AIS transmitter/receivers is coming down and I look forward to being able to afford one sometime in the next few years