RADAR 101

While your chartplotter will (hopefully) show you where the land and sea should be, only radar can show you where everything actually is.

The invention of AIS has certainly made navigation simpler and a lot safer for small craft, especially now that many of the major marker buoys and beacons out there have real or virtual (more likely) AIS transmitters to indicate their position. Still, there are many vessels out there that either don’t have an AIS transmitter fitted or that switch it off at sensitive times (fishing and military craft, in particular), which can be a threat to safe navigation, especially in poor visibility.

While expensive and often underused, radar really should be the #1 must-have safety device for coastal and offshore navigation. Even when your collision risk is low, when crossing a wide-open ocean, for instance, radar can still be extremely useful when warning of bad weather approaching. Consider the following