ANALYSIS OF THE LEVEL OF KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF REGULATIONS FOR PREVENTING COLLISIONS AT SEA

The Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREG) is a collection of international legal standards adopted in order to avoid collisions at sea. Comprehensive knowledge of these rules is required for all who sail on the sea. The ACTs project (Avoiding Collisions at Sea) investigates the current problems in applying these Rules and intends to develop a new online course making it simpler and easier to understand them. A COLREG questionnaire has been drawn up for research purposes. The purpose of the questionnaire is checking which rules are more difficult to understand. In this paper, the authors analyse the level of understanding of the Rules in a group of secondary maritime school students. The survey results indicate that many of the basic principles of COLREG are neither understood nor applied.