The peak of the summer tourist season brought a great crowd and general chaos at sea in the water area of Boka Kotorska.
Numerous smaller or larger vessels, cruisers, yachts, excursion boats, speedboats, scooters and various other vessels for sports and recreation "splash" in almost all parts of the bay, with almost all of them, with the exception of cruisers on which the pilots of the Port of Kotor are on board, most often they do not comply with most of the valid regulations and provisions of the Maritime Navigation Safety Act.
This is particularly visible in one of the busiest and most navigationally challenging parts of Boka - the Strait of Veriga, through which hundreds of various vessels pass every day in the northern and southern course between the Tivat and Kotor-Risan bays.
The largest number of them, especially the so-called of recreational boaters and speedboats in Boka of increasingly numerous taxi boat services, do not follow the rules for navigation in the straits at all, and those who respect the speed limit for navigation in Boka, which is ten knots in the bay itself, or only six, can be counted on the fingers of one hand nodes in Kumborski and Verige Strait.
Instead of such normal sailing, where the Verige, where the Cape of Our Lady and Tivat's Cape of Turkey on the Kotor side, the two coasts of the bay come close to each other by about 300 meters, such vessels literally "fly by" at speeds of up to 30 knots. At the same time, most of the taxi speedboat skippers approach the shore only about fifty meters (three times less than allowed), endangering bathers, or do not follow the rules of the right side at all.
Bearing in mind the density of traffic, because dozens of speedboats "fly" through Verige like this for an hour, it is simply a miracle that no accidents with more serious consequences have occurred so far.
And while the daily chaos continues with unabated ferocity, there are no visible patrols of the Port Authority, i.e. the Navigation Safety Inspection, which would have to curb and sanction reckless and dangerous behavior at sea.
In addition to the fact that everyone at sea would be safer, the Port Authority and the inspection would also fill the state budget very quickly, bearing in mind the huge number of violators of the regulations and the fact that, according to the Law, legal entities whose vessels do not comply with the sailing speed limit in the bay at ten or six knots, a threatened fine in the amount of 1.500 to even 20.000 euros, and the physical - skippers of those vessels are prescribed by law fines in the amount of 200 to 2.000 euros.
After the latest amendments to the Navigation Safety Act, vessels up to 24 meters in length are allowed to sail in Boka at a speed four knots higher than the maximum speed that applies to larger ships. With this, we tried to meet the owners of taxi speedboats and the majority of sailors who have yachts up to 24 meters in length, because this is the length limit above which the category of the most expensive - megayachts - begins.
However, most of those smaller vessels with a length of 24 meters do not at all respect the maximum sailing speed of 14, i.e. ten knots in the straits, but drive two or even three times faster than that.
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