I strongly agree with John Marshall. I have known at least 6 people who have been lost at sea due to collision with commercial shipping. I know another half a dozen who survived a collision. Not all were single handing, but all were before AIS. Some even had radar Modern navigational, and collision avoidance techniques may slightly decrease the risk of collision, but not all of the time. I have only single handed a few days at a time, and found myself hallucinating at night due to sleep deprivation. We have made over a dozen evasion maneuvers to avoid ships, which were potential collision situations in the open ocean. Several were ones in busy shipping lanes, which we did not see even with radar due to the ship coming around a headland, back ground lights and other traffic. We have encountered large ships with the only person on the bridge asleep. I feel that single handed voyaging in inheriently dangerous. It was less dangerous when Joshua Sloclum and Harry Pidgeon circumnavigated because of less commercial traffic. One might argue with AIS and radar, that the risk of collision is reduced. But in this case, apparently the skipper did not made a proper appraisal of the risks. Most of our voyaging was with two people on the boat. Standing orders were if there was a potential closing to less than a mile the off watch person was to be awoken. In this circumstance, there was even less excuse for a collision, since apparently the girl knew that the ship was there, and apparently knew that there was some risk of collision or at a near miss. If you read Ken Williams blogs he tried to keep a mile distance--and was uncomfortable at less in the Japanese waters--with the closer encounters which were present. There are certainly some 16 year olds who are capable of doing a circumnavigation. But 13 is a bit young. At 13 I was skippering a boat in ocean races, but would have not been qualified to do a solo circumnavigation, even with modern navigation and collision avoidance techniques. Bob Austin