What Is It with Cruise Ships and Lights?

We’ve been ocean sailing at night a bit lately, which has reminded us of one of our big grips — what’s the deal with cruise ships and navigation lights? All the ones we’ve seen have been equipped with the proper navigation lights, yet on every one, the navigation lights have been all but overwhelmed by all the other lights on the ship. We don’t care if it’s the Orgasm on the Waves, the Floating Midnight Buffet, or the Naked at Sea, most of them appear as big rectangles of bright lights, on which the navigation lights can’t be discerned.

Early the other evening we were going past Phillipsburg, Dutch Sint Maarten when, over the course of 45 minutes, no less than four large cruise ships departed the big facility there. Not only could we not immediately identify the port and starboard lights on any of them, it took us a long time to tell the bow from the stern on two of them. And yeah, we’re clued in about bow range lights. And in the case of two cruise ships that passed within a mile of us, we never could make out the port and starboard lights.

We contrast this with another large ship that was coming into port from the west. Her range lights and port and starboard lights were brilliant against the night sky, and not overshadowed — if you can take the reverse pun — by the ship’s other lights.

We know that most big vessels and ships are now required to be equipped with AIS, which allows all of them to know everything — name, length, course, speed, draft, hailing port, sexual orientation of the captain and first mate, etc — about each other. But shouldn’t all mariners be entitled to know where these behemoths are headed? And we’ve had the same problem with cruise ships such as the Sombrero Princess and Azure Burrito off the coast of Baja during the Ha-Ha.

Have you had similar problems with cruise — or other — ship navigation lights,  or is this problem specific to just us? Email Richard with your thoughts.