Two ships meet in the night...

At about 3:30 this morning Scott picked up a target on Radar about 13 miles out. He keep a eye on it for a while and by the time that Steve came up for the 4:00 watch change, Scott had determined that distance had closed to 6.5nm but the relative bearing hadn't changed. Rusty came on deck to help assess the situation. As the ship got a little closer, we saw thier range lights were lined up. We also saw their red and green navigation lights. It was now clear that they were coming right at us. Just as we were about to make a course correction Rusty noticed that the ship had already made a course change to avoid us. The relative bearing slowly started changing and they slowly passed safely behind us. We never got any closer than 2.75 miles. The whole incident took about 45 minutes to unfold. Scott handed over the helm to Steve at 4:20. The rest of then night was without incident. We also saw 2 cruise ships off in the distance the other day and saw another sailboat a few days back.