I have been keeping an eye on my AIS display during passages this week and the sheer volume of traffic in the Bahía de Palma is quite something. Between the ferries running to Ibiza and Menorca, the commercial traffic, charter boats coming and going from Club de Mar and the Real Club Náutico, and the superyachts jockeying for position, there are moments when my B&G screen looks like a London rush hour.
What concerns me a bit is how many smaller boats — especially charter boats and day hire RIBs — do not seem to have AIS at all, or at least not transmitting. On Saturday afternoon coming back from a short run to Portals Vells I counted at least a dozen boats within half a mile that were not showing on my display. You only see them visually, which obviously is what we should always be doing, but the whole point of AIS is that extra layer of awareness.
For anyone running a plotter with AIS overlay I would strongly recommend setting up CPA alarms — I have mine set to 0.3nm and 10 minutes TCPA, which gives enough warning to take action without the alarm going off every thirty seconds in crowded waters. On my Hallberg-Rassy I run the Raymarine AIS700 class B+ transponder and it has been very reliable, though I am thinking about upgrading to class A for the better transmission power and priority in the system.
Anyone else finding August traffic a challenge, or am I just getting old and grumpy?
James, you are definitely not just being grumpy — the traffic has been mental this week. I was out on a friend’s boat on Wednesday doing some practice tacking in the bay and we had to abandon the session because there were so many jet skis and day charter RIBs buzzing around that it felt genuinely unsafe. None of them were on AIS obviously.
This is something I have been thinking about since finishing my Day Skipper. During the course the instructor hammered home the importance of keeping a proper lookout, and at the time I thought yes of course, that is obvious. But when you are actually out there single-handing or with just one crew, trying to manage the sails and watch for traffic in every direction while also checking the chart — it is a lot to keep on top of, especially when boats are appearing from nowhere at 25 knots.
I do not have AIS on the boats I have been crewing on but I have been using the MarineTraffic app on my phone as a rough guide. I know it is not the same as a proper AIS display but is it worth anything as a backup, or is it too delayed to be useful?
James, Sophie — you are both right, the bay has become a zoo in August. I counted fourteen charter cats anchored off Illetes on Tuesday afternoon. Fourteen! When I started sailing here in the nineties you might see two or three boats on a busy weekend.
The AIS congestion is real but what worries me more is the traffic that does NOT show on AIS — the RIBs, the jet skis, the paddleboarders drifting out from the beaches. I have started keeping a much wider berth from the coast between Portals Vells and Cala Major because you simply cannot predict what will appear from behind a headland.
It calms down enormously after the 20th of August when the Spanish holidays end. Two more weeks and you will have the bay mostly to yourselves again.
From the charter side of things — yes, the AIS picture in the bay is overwhelming right now but honestly it is the boats NOT on AIS that keep me up at night. I had a near miss on Friday with a day-hire RIB that came screaming out from behind the breakwater at Can Pastilla doing at least 25 knots. No AIS, no VHF, no clue. My crew were on the foredeck sorting the genoa and did not even see it.
James, your point about Class B transponders on charter boats is spot on. The rental companies should be fitting them as standard but I suspect cost is the issue — fitting and maintaining a transponder on fifty RIBs adds up. Until that changes I have basically given up trusting the AIS picture as complete and gone back to old-fashioned eyeball lookout with one dedicated person on watch whenever we are in the bay.
Sorry if this is a silly beginner question, but what exactly is AIS? Is it something every boat has or only bigger ones? The boats we use on the Competent Crew course are smaller yachts and I have never noticed anything like what James is describing with the screen full of little triangles.
Also the near miss Katrin described is terrifying. We had a jet ski come very close to us during a session last week near Portals Vells and even the instructor looked annoyed.
Anna, not a silly question at all — AIS stands for Automatic Identification System. It is basically a transponder that broadcasts your boat’s position, speed, heading and identity to other vessels nearby, and receives theirs in return. Think of it like a name tag that shouts where you are every few seconds.
Bigger commercial ships are required to carry it by law. Recreational yachts over a certain size often have it fitted too, especially newer ones. The training boats you are on for Competent Crew probably do not have a full AIS transceiver but they might have a receive-only unit — worth asking your instructor next session.
The problem James and Carlos are highlighting is that in August the bay is full of boats that have no AIS at all — jet skis, small RIBs, paddleboarders, kayakers. So even if your screen shows a clear path ahead, you still need to keep a proper visual lookout. Eyes beat electronics every time, especially close to shore.
Katrin, thank you for explaining AIS so clearly! I looked it up after your post and now I understand what all those little triangles are on the plotter screens I have seen in photos. It is like a Schifffahrtsradar — sorry, a shipping radar — but smarter because it tells you the actual name and speed of the other boat.
I suppose on our training boats the instructor just watches everything visually? We are usually quite close to shore and there is always someone more experienced keeping an eye out. But it does make me a bit nervous thinking about all that traffic in the bay that Sophie and James described.